Towards Artificial General Intelligence

The longer term goal for artificial intelligence is artificial general intelligence. This is where artificial intelligence goes beyond specific and narrowly scoped tasks to be able to perform cognitive tasks across a range or problem solving scenarios. We are a long way away from artificial general intelligence, but it's worth thinking about the cognitive landscape that these developments will have to traverse.

In his seminal book - How to Create a Mind (2012) - Ray Kurzweil set out the key ideas behind pursuing artificial general intelligence. To set the stage for a broader understanding of AI in the creative world, let's now take a deeper look into the human mind, thoughts, memory, learning, intelligence and creativity.

You are Smarter Than You Think.

The human brain is capable of performing truly staggering numbers of calculations. Whilst computers can process information very quickly, the brain has the advantage or being able to process vast amounts of information in parallel. The capacity of the brain is a factor of the number of neurons in it, and in turn the number of potential connections between these neurons. These connections - known as synapses - are the basic building blocks of thought.

The number of potential connections between neurons is a staggering 2 to the power of 13 factorial – 2¹³! A factorial is used to define numbers that are too big to express even using exponentials.

A human brain has the potential for more thoughts then there are atoms in the universe. Not even the biggest and fastest supercomputer comes close to the computing power of a human brain. Perhaps when quantum computing matures the hardware may exist to match the processing power of a brain, but even then there's the massive challenge of designing the software to take on the extreme range of tasks that the human brain can handle.

Figure 1. Neurons and connections