human-level AI
In plain wordsAI that can match an ordinary adult across the whole range of thinking tasks, such as talking, learning, reasoning and planning. An older, more intuitive name for the goal now usually called general AI.
An AI system whose overall cognitive abilities match those of a typical adult human across the range of intellectual tasks, rather than within one specialty. The phrase states the founding ambition of the field and was the usual name for its long-term goal before artificial general intelligenceartificial general intelligence, n.: AI that could learn and do almost any mental task a capable adult can, rather than excelling at one narrow job. Experts disagree on the exact bar and on when, or whether, it will arrive. became common; the two are now largely interchangeable. Nils Nilsson proposed judging it by employment: a human-level system should be able to do most of the jobs people are paid to do. Some researchers, notably Yann LeCunYann LeCun, prop. n.: A French-American computer scientist who pioneered the neural networks that recognize images, led Meta's AI research for over a decade, and argues that chatbots alone will not reach human-level AI., prefer it to AGI on the grounds that human intelligence is itself specialized rather than general. A conceptual difficulty is that machine abilities do not rise evenly: a system that matched humans at its weakest skill would already far exceed them at many others, so human level marks a broad band rather than a point.
Matching people at chess was never the goal; human-level AI means matching them at everything at once.
Origin
The goal is as old as the 1955 Dartmouth proposalDartmouth workshop, prop. n.: A summer meeting of scientists at Dartmouth College in 1956, planned in a 1955 funding proposal that first used the phrase 'artificial intelligence'. Most histories treat it as the moment AI became a research field of its own.. The phrase was established in AI writing by the 1990s: John McCarthy's 1996 lecture 'From Here to Human-Level AI' (published 2007) treated it as the field's central aim, and Nils Nilsson's 2005 article 'Human-Level Artificial Intelligence? Be Serious!' proposed the employment test.
Related
- artificial general intelligenceartificial general intelligence, n.: AI that could learn and do almost any mental task a capable adult can, rather than excelling at one narrow job. Experts disagree on the exact bar and on when, or whether, it will arrive.
- high-level machine intelligencehigh-level machine intelligence, n.: A yardstick used in surveys of AI researchers: the point at which machines on their own could outdo human workers at every task, in both quality and cost.
- Turing testTuring test, n.: Alan Turing's proposed test of machine intelligence: a judge holds typed conversations with a hidden person and a hidden computer, and the computer passes if the judge cannot consistently pick it out.
- levels of AGIlevels of AGI, n.: A scheme from Google DeepMind researchers for grading AI by how well it performs and how broad its skills are, from emerging to superhuman, much as self-driving cars are graded by levels.
- John McCarthyJohn McCarthy, prop. n.: The American computer scientist who coined the term 'artificial intelligence', invented the Lisp programming language and championed formal logic as the route to machine common sense.
- Dartmouth workshopDartmouth workshop, prop. n.: A summer meeting of scientists at Dartmouth College in 1956, planned in a 1955 funding proposal that first used the phrase 'artificial intelligence'. Most histories treat it as the moment AI became a research field of its own.
- narrow AInarrow AI, n.: AI built to do one specific job, or a small set of related jobs, such as playing chess or spotting spam, without being able to turn its skill to unrelated problems.
- superintelligencesuperintelligence, n.: A mind, usually imagined as an AI, that would leave even the cleverest people far behind in nearly every kind of thinking, not just in one game or skill. None is known to exist.
Sources
- McCarthy, J. (2007). From here to human-level AI. Artificial Intelligence 171(18).
- Nilsson, N. J. (2005). Human-Level Artificial Intelligence? Be Serious! AI Magazine 26(4).
Mentioned in
artificial general intelligenceartificial general intelligence, n.: AI that could learn and do almost any mental task a capable adult can, rather than excelling at one narrow job. Experts disagree on the exact bar and on when, or whether, it will arrive., high-level machine intelligencehigh-level machine intelligence, n.: A yardstick used in surveys of AI researchers: the point at which machines on their own could outdo human workers at every task, in both quality and cost., levels of AGIlevels of AGI, n.: A scheme from Google DeepMind researchers for grading AI by how well it performs and how broad its skills are, from emerging to superhuman, much as self-driving cars are graded by levels.