298 16 AGI Preschool

298 16 AGI Preschool 16.5 Beyond Preschool Once an AGI passes preschool, what are the next steps? There is still a long way to go, from preschool to an AGI system that is capable of, say, passing the Turing Test or serving as an effective artificial scientist. Our suggestion is to extend the school metaphor further, and make use of existing curricula for higher levels of virtual education: grade school, secondary school, and all levels of post- secondary education. If an AGI can pass online primary and secondary schools such as e- tutor.com, and go on to earn an online degree from an accredited university, then clearly said AGI has successfully achieved “human level, roughly humanlike AGI.” This sort of testing is interesting not only because it allows assessment of stages intermediate between preschool and adult, but also because it tests humanlike intelligence without requiring precise imitation of human behavior. If an AI can get a BA degree at an accredited university, via online coursework (assuming for simplicity courses where no voice interaction is needed), then we should consider that AT to have human-level intelligence. University coursework spans multiple disciplines, and the details of the homework assignments and exams are not known in advance, so like a human student the AGI team can’t cheat. In addition to the core coursework, a schooling approach also tests basic social interaction and natural language communication, ability to do online research, and general problem solving ability. However, there is no rigid requirement to be strictly humanlike in order to pass university classes. Most of our concrete examples in the following chapters will pertain to the preschool context, because it’s simple to understand, and because we feel that getting to the “AGI preschool student” level is going to be the largest leap. Once that level is obtained, moving further will likely be difficult also, but we suspect it will be more a matter of steady incremental improvements — whereas the achievement of preschool-level functionality will be a large leap from the current situation. 16.6 Issues with Virtual Preschool Engineering As noted above there are two broad approaches to realizing the “AGI Preschool” idea: using the AGI to control a physical robot and then crafting a preschool environment suitable to the robot’s sensors and actuators; or, using the AGI to control a virtual agent in an appropriately rich virtual-world preschool. The robotic approach is harder from an AI perspective (as one must deal with problems of sensation and actuation), but easier from an environment-construction perspective. In the virtual world case, one quickly runs up against the current limitations of virtual world technologies, which have been designed mainly for entertainment or social- networking purposes, not with the requirements of AGI systems in mind. In Chapter 9 we discussed the general requirements that an environment should possess to be supportive of humanlike intelligence. Referring back to that list, it’s clear that current virtual worlds are fairly strong on multimodal communication, and fairly weak on naive physics. More concretely, if one wants a virtual world so that HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013214