Defining and Explorting the Intelligence Space

Intelligence is a difficult concept to define, despite many attempts at doing so. Rather than trying to settle on a single definition, this article introduces a broad perspective on what intelligence is, by laying out a cascade of definitions that induces both a nested hierarchy of three levels of intelligence and a wider-ranging space that is built around them and approximations to them. Within this intelligence space, regions are identified that correspond to both natural - most particularly, human - intelligence and artificial intelligence (AI), along with the crossover notion of humanlike intelligence. These definitions are then exploited in early explorations of four more advanced, and likely more controversial, topics: the singularity, generative AI, ethics, and intellectual property. Consider the space of all possible forms of intelligence, what can be called the intelligence space. We know very little about the nature of this space other than how it is currently populated with various, often only partially understood, instances of natural and artificial intelligence, although some earlier thoughts on this space - typically under different names - can be found in [2-5]. Rosenbloom [6] takes a different tack at understanding this space, in attempting to define a set of dichotomies whose cross product spans technologies underlying artificial and human intelligence, with the possibility of it spanning a much larger swath of the intelligence space. Here, another tack is taken, of starting with a generic, trilevel definition of intelligence that anchors the space and hypothesizing that a range of approximations to this definition could flesh out much of the full space (Section 1). This space is then exploited by exploring the relationship between natural and artificial intelligence via the mapping of human intelligence, humanlike intelligence, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science onto regions of this space (Section 2) and then beginning an exploration into the implications of this all for four more advanced, and likely more controversial topics: the singularity, as it relates to intelligence; ethics, with a particular focus on its relationship to artificial intelligence (AI); the current white-hot topic of generative AI, with a particular focus on large language models (LLMs); and intellectual property, with a particular focus on whether or not its creation might be ascribed to AI systems (Section 3).