Strong AI - Artificial General Intelligence Research

Artificial General Intelligence Research

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) describes research that aims to create machines capable of general intelligent action. The term was introduced by Mark Gubrud in 1997 in a discussion of the implications of fully automated military production and operations. The research objective is much older, for example Doug Lenat's Cyc project (that began in 1984), and Allen Newell's Soar project are regarded as within the scope of AGI. AGI research activity in 2006 was described by Pei Wang and Ben Goertzel as "producing publications and preliminary results". As yet, most AI researchers have devoted little attention to AGI, with some claiming that intelligence is too complex to be completely replicated in the near term. However, a small number of computer scientists are active in AGI research, and many of this group are contributing to a series of AGI conferences. The research is extremely diverse and often pioneering in nature. In the introduction to his book, Goertzel says that estimates of the time needed before a truly flexible AGI is built vary from 10 years to over a century, but the consensus in the AGI research community seems to be that the timeline discussed by Ray Kurzweil in "The Singularity is Near" (i.e. between 2015 and 2045) is plausible. Most mainstream AI researchers doubt that progress will be this rapid. Organizations actively pursuing AGI include Adaptive AI, Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute (AGIRI), the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Bitphase AI, and TexAI. One recent addition is Numenta, a project based on the theories of Jeff Hawkins, the creator of the Palm Pilot. While Numenta takes a computational approach to general intelligence, Hawkins is also the founder of the Redwood Neuroscience Institute, which explores conscious thought from a biological perspective. AND Corporation has been active in this field since 1990, and has developed machine intelligence processes based on phase coherence principles, having strong similarities to digital holography and QM with respect to quantum collapse of the wave function. Ben Goertzel is pursuing an embodied AGI through the open-source OpenCog project. Current code includes embodied virtual pets capable of learning simple English-language commands, as well as integration with real-world robotics, being done at the robotics lab of Hugo de Garis at Xiamen University.