From Here to Human-Level Artificial General Intelligence in Four (Not All That) Simple Steps

In the 15 years since I first introduced the term "artificial general intelligence" (AGI), the AI field has advanced tremendously. We now have self-driving cars, automated face recognition and image captioning, machine translation and expert AI game-players, and so much more. However, these achievements remain essentially in the domain of "narrow AI"--AI that carries out tasks based on specifically-supplied data or rules, or carefully-created training situations. AIs that can generalize to unanticipated domains and confront the world as autonomous agents are still part of the road ahead. The question remains: what do we need to do to get from today's narrow AI tools, which have become mainstream in business and society, to the AGI envisioned by futurists and science fiction authors?