Tomorrow's 'general' AI revolution will grow from today's technology

During his closing remarks at the I/O 2019 keynote last week, Jeff Dean, Google AI's lead, noted that the company is looking at "AI that can work across disciplines," suggesting the Silicon Valley giant may soon pursue artificial general intelligence, a technology that eventually could match or exceed human intellect. In today's pop culture, machines with artificial general intelligence (AGI) are typically portrayed as walking, talking human analogs replete with personalities -- from the Terminator's murderous intent to Vision's noble heroism. In reality, self-aware robots are a long way off. Nathan Michael, associate research professor and the director of the Resilient Intelligent Systems Lab at Carnegie Mellon University, argues that generalized AI systems will grow out from today's single-purpose "narrow" AIs. "General AI is representative of this concept of bringing together many different kinds of specialized AI," he explained. AGI isn't so much a singular standalone system -- it's no digital Athena bursting forth from Zeus' forehead -- but rather a threshold of capability derived from a collection of narrow AI's working together, Michael said.