Flying an aircraft requires talking to air traffic control which existing systems can’t do. Though obviously not a huge issue when the aircraft already has radios, except all those FAA regulations apply to every single aircraft you’ve retrofitting.
The advantage of general intelligence is using a small set of hardware now lets you tackle a huge range of tasks or in the above aircraft types. We can mix speakers, eyes, and hands to do a vast array of tasks. Needing new hardware and software for every task very quickly becomes prohibitive.
The advantage of general intelligence is that it can fly you home to the nearest airport, drive you the last mile, and, once home, cook you supper. But for that you need the hardware to be equally general.
If you need to retrofit airplanes and in such a way that the hardware is specific to flying, no need for general intelligence. Special intelligence will work just as well. Multimodal AI isn't AGI.
No, the advantage of AGI isn’t being able to do all those physical things, the advantage of AGI is you don’t need to keep building new software for every task.
Let’s suppose you wanted to replace a pilot for a 747, now you need to be able fly, land, etc which we’re already capable of. However, actual job of a pilot goes well past just flying.
You also need to do the preflight such as verifying fuel is appropriately for the trip, check weather, alternate landing spots, preflight walk around the aircraft etc etc. It also needs to be able to keep up with any changing procedures as a special purpose softener you’re talking a multi billion dollar investment, or have an AGI run through the normal pilot training and certification process for a trivial fraction of those costs.
> the advantage of AGI is you don’t need to keep building new software for every task.
Even the human's brain seems to be 'built' for its body. You're moving into ASI realm if the software can configure itself for the body automatically.
> That’s the promise of AGI.
That's the promise of multimodal AI. AGI requires general ability – meaning basically able to do anything humans can – which requires a body as capable as a human's body.
Human brains aren’t limited to the standard human body plan. People born with an extra finger have no issues operating that finger just as well as people with the normal complement of fingers. Animal experiments have pushed this quite far.
If your AI has an issue because the robot has a different body plan, then no it’s not AGI. That doesn’t mean it needs to be able to watch every camera in a city at the same time, but you can use multiple AGI’s.
> Human brains aren’t limited to the standard human body plan.
But as the body starts to lose function (i.e. disability), we start to consider those humans special intelligences instead of general intelligences. The body and mind are intrinsically linked.
Best we can tell the human brain is bootstrapped to work with the human body with specialized functions, notably functions to keep it alive. It can go beyond those predefined behaviours, but not beyond its own self. If you placed the brain in an entirely different body, that which it doesn't recognize, it would quickly die.
As that pertains to artificial analogs, that means you can't just throw AGI at your hardware and see it function. You still need to manually prepare the bulk of the foundational software, contrary to the promise you envision. The generality of AGI is limited to how general its hardware is. If the hardware is specialized, the intelligence will be beholden to being specialized as well.
There is a hypothetical world where you can throw intelligence at any random hardware and watch it go, realizing the promise, but we call that ASI.
> As that pertains to artificial analogs, that means you can't just throw AGI at your hardware and see it function.
There’s a logical contradiction in saying AGI is incapable of being trained to do some function. It might take several to operate a sufficiently complex bit of hardware, but each individual function must be within the capability of an AGI.
> but we call that ASI
No ASI is about superhuman capabilities especially things like working memory and recursive self improvement. AGI capable of human level control of arbitrary platforms isn’t ASI. Conversely you can have an ASI stuck on a supercomputer cluster using wetware etc, that does qualify even if it can’t be loaded into a drone.
AGI on the other hand is about moving throughout wildly different tasks from real time image processing to answering phone calls. If there’s some aspect of operating a hardware platform an AI can’t do then it’s not AGI.
The advantage of general intelligence is using a small set of hardware now lets you tackle a huge range of tasks or in the above aircraft types. We can mix speakers, eyes, and hands to do a vast array of tasks. Needing new hardware and software for every task very quickly becomes prohibitive.