I think there are two interesting questions relating to this:
Are there any seemingly narrow tasks that are fully general in the sense that the ability to perform such a task requires, and implies, being able to generalize to some minimal level of performance on all tasks that we could classify as intelligence-related?
We have seen performance beyond—and even incredibly far beyond—human performance on various narrow intelligence-related tasks. Is there generality far beyond human generality? In particular do humans actually have huge blind spots that even an otherwise sub-human AI might be able to exploit in the real world?
Tasks that animals usually face? (Find food, a safe place to sleep, survive, reproduce …)
This is an intriguing question. My first intuition: Probably not, because …
It seems evolution would have figured it out by now. After all, evolution optimizes heavily for generality. Any easily fixable blind spot would be a low hanging fruit for natural selection (e.g. by being exploited in inter-species competition).
The level of generality of most animals seems very similar, and seems to have stayed similar for a very long time. Even the case of humans with apparently unusually high generality is, if the point in my post was right, not actually a case of unusually high generality, just a case of unusually high intelligence.
More specifically: Generality seems to be strongly related to having a “real-world domain” (see Arbital link in the post), which even quite simple animals already satisfy. It is not clear what could be more general than that.
On the other hand, perhaps there is indeed a higher level of generality, just not one which is a low-hanging fruit. Or one which is at least not a low-hanging fruit for the neuron-based brain structure which evolution on Earth is using in animals. (For example, brains are highly parallel but very slow in serial tasks, while silicon processors have a much higher serial speed. From computational complexity theory it is known that not all algorithms can be parallelized efficiently.)
Another possibility is that some higher level of generality simply needs a certain amount of intelligence in order to “work”. Which would mean that at some point in increasing intelligence, a phase-transition to a higher generality level would occur. The reason this has not happened yet in the history of evolution would simply be that a sufficient level of intelligence was not yet achieved.
Thinking of it, one possible example for the latter having already happened once could be: cultural evolution. Only humans can (due to language, but also due to high intelligence) accumulate information across generations, learn, and adapt via culture instead of just via genes. That would indeed contradict my theory that humans are not significantly more general than other animals. If we accept the emergence of cultural evolution in humans as a phase transition to a higher level of generality, then there could be still other levels, inaccessible to us, but possibly accessible to a highly intelligent AI.
Edit: Actually there were at least two phase transitions in “learning methods” of the above kind: Once via the emergence of cultural evolution some hundred thousand years ago, and once via the emergence of brains some hundred million years ago. If evolution is already some kind of learning process, then organisms with brains add one layer, and our “cultural” layer is a further one on top.
I think there are two interesting questions relating to this:
Are there any seemingly narrow tasks that are fully general in the sense that the ability to perform such a task requires, and implies, being able to generalize to some minimal level of performance on all tasks that we could classify as intelligence-related?
We have seen performance beyond—and even incredibly far beyond—human performance on various narrow intelligence-related tasks. Is there generality far beyond human generality? In particular do humans actually have huge blind spots that even an otherwise sub-human AI might be able to exploit in the real world?
Sorry—forgot about your comment.
Tasks that animals usually face? (Find food, a safe place to sleep, survive, reproduce …)
This is an intriguing question. My first intuition: Probably not, because …
It seems evolution would have figured it out by now. After all, evolution optimizes heavily for generality. Any easily fixable blind spot would be a low hanging fruit for natural selection (e.g. by being exploited in inter-species competition).
The level of generality of most animals seems very similar, and seems to have stayed similar for a very long time. Even the case of humans with apparently unusually high generality is, if the point in my post was right, not actually a case of unusually high generality, just a case of unusually high intelligence.
More specifically: Generality seems to be strongly related to having a “real-world domain” (see Arbital link in the post), which even quite simple animals already satisfy. It is not clear what could be more general than that.
On the other hand, perhaps there is indeed a higher level of generality, just not one which is a low-hanging fruit. Or one which is at least not a low-hanging fruit for the neuron-based brain structure which evolution on Earth is using in animals. (For example, brains are highly parallel but very slow in serial tasks, while silicon processors have a much higher serial speed. From computational complexity theory it is known that not all algorithms can be parallelized efficiently.)
Another possibility is that some higher level of generality simply needs a certain amount of intelligence in order to “work”. Which would mean that at some point in increasing intelligence, a phase-transition to a higher generality level would occur. The reason this has not happened yet in the history of evolution would simply be that a sufficient level of intelligence was not yet achieved.
Thinking of it, one possible example for the latter having already happened once could be: cultural evolution. Only humans can (due to language, but also due to high intelligence) accumulate information across generations, learn, and adapt via culture instead of just via genes. That would indeed contradict my theory that humans are not significantly more general than other animals. If we accept the emergence of cultural evolution in humans as a phase transition to a higher level of generality, then there could be still other levels, inaccessible to us, but possibly accessible to a highly intelligent AI.
Edit: Actually there were at least two phase transitions in “learning methods” of the above kind: Once via the emergence of cultural evolution some hundred thousand years ago, and once via the emergence of brains some hundred million years ago. If evolution is already some kind of learning process, then organisms with brains add one layer, and our “cultural” layer is a further one on top.