"General" versus "narrow" intelligence

AI general intelligence may be further away than the optimists believe

One of the paradoxes about intelligence is that it is quite hard to develop an objective measure to test and quantify it. In the era of Artificial Intelligence, methods have been developed to enable computers to solve specific tasks that were earlier supposed to require intelligence.

But AI programmes that solve specific problems often do so by using repetitive methods of fast calculation and number-crunching that are very different from the ways in which humans approach the same problems. Those specific solutions don't help the AI learn how to solve other types of problems. For example, an image recognition AI cannot