AGI, ASI and the extreme confusion of it all

There has recently been a huge amount of confusion over the concept of Artificial General Intelligence, AGI, and exactly what it means, whether it is something that should be expected, and what it means for society.  One thing that is seen frequently is speculation of the “Race to AGI” or questions like “How will we know when we have AGI” or “What if they already have AGI and haven’t told anyone?”

This whole line of reasoning, the way it is framed, and the questions being asked here indicate complete incoherence about what AGI or Artificial General Intelligence is, or at least what it is supposed to be. If that is not bad enough we now are being told that AI is close to “super intelligence” or “ASI.” This is an entirely fictional idea, and nobody can even agree as to what it is, other than it might be scary.

The Basic Idea of AGI

The concept of artificial intelligence in the form of a fictionalized “thinking machine” goes back centuries.  The modern concept of computer systems that simulate intelligent behavior dates to the 1950’s.  As systems dubbed AI were developed, it was clear that they were relatively narrow and bounded in what they could do.  Machine learning and cognitive simulations could optimize systems and respond to variables, but they lacked the kind of “intelligence” that we think of in a human.

Intuitively, it was always clear that there existed a higher level of “general intelligence” of the type found in humans and other thinking beings.  In the simplest sense, an AI that could be communicated with, like a person and could understand human-like concepts, like situations being subjectively better or worse.  It made perfect sense that the mental model for what general intelligence would look like would be a synthetic human mind.

The terms for Artificial General Intelligence versus Narrow Artificial Intelligence was coined in 2007, but the basic concept goes back much further.  It had been often called “strong AI,” “human-like AI,” “full AI,” or “true AI.”   In fact, this distinction became obvious early in the field of AI, when it was clear that systems that could mimic certain aspects of human intelligence were distinct from the popular nation of a fully digital mind, or anything like human level capabilities across domains.