One way to think about human-level artificial intelligence is to contrast it with the current state of AI technology. A human-level AI would be a machine that is capable of carrying out the same range of intellectual tasks that we humans are capable of carrying out.3 It is a machine that would be “able to learn to do anything that a human can do,” as Norvig and Russell put it in their textbook on AI.4 Taken together, the range of abilities that characterize intelligence gives humans the ability to solve problems and achieve a wide variety of goals. As a result, an AI that is human-level would be a system that would be able to perform the same tasks and solve all of the issues that we humans currently face. Such a machine, or collective of machines, would be able to do the work of a translator, an accountant, an illustrator, a teacher, a therapist, a truck driver, or the work of a trader on the world’s financial markets. Like us, it would also be able to do research and science and to develop new technologies based on that.
The concept of human-level AI has some clear advantages. Using the familiarity of our own intelligence as a reference provides us with some clear guidance on how to imagine the capabilities of this technology.
However, it also has clear disadvantages. Anchoring the imagination of future AI systems to the familiar reality of human intelligence carries the risk that it obscures the enormous differences between them.
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