No, Artificial General Intelligence is Not Coming

AGI is coming, and coming soon.

At least that’s what most of the AI experts are saying. AGI—artificial general intelligence—is the ability of an AI system to perform any cognitive task that an educated human can do. As opposed to AIs that can perform one or two tasks well, an AGI would be able to do any intellectual activity as competently as the smartest human in each field. And not only do AI experts think AGI is coming soon, artificial general intelligence is the goal of all AI companies. 

These companies want to create a single AI that can do your taxes, answer your kid’s math questions, diagnose your grandmother’s latest illness, and write a Shakespearian sonnet for your wife—as well as the best human accountant, tutor, doctor, and poet. Any task you throw at it, AGI could do, and do well. It could even potentially find a cure for cancer and solve intractable political problems. This holy grail of the AI field is, according to many, just around the corner. Back in 2024, Elon Musk predicted that we’d have AGI by 2026, and most expert estimates place the advent of AGI before the end of this decade.

The problem is that they’re all wrong, and that’s because these experts in artificial intelligence have no idea what intelligence actually is.

Imagine a man who becomes an expert in dribbling a basketball. Not only an expert, but the world’s greatest dribbler. He can do things with a ball that no one else can do, and even great basketball players are amazed at his abilities. Yet, this same man can’t shoot, can’t pass, and can’t play defense. He also can’t run while dribbling. Do you think any NBA team would find a place on their squad for this one-talent wonder? Of course not; he’d be a huge liability if he were put on the court with professional basketball players.

AI is much like this expert dribbler. It’s amazing in a thin slice of what we call intelligence. Recently, for example, an AI solved a mathematical problem that had stumped experts for almost 100 years (it showed that the Jacobian Conjecture is false). AI is also incredible at solving more mundane, everyday problems (I recently fixed a problem on my car, in spite of my complete ignorance of car mechanics, simply by taking some photos and asking an AI for help). 

When we hear stories of AI achievements that seem ripped out of the pages of futuristic science-fiction stories, we’re primed to think that AGI must be coming soon. Yet these headline-grabbing stories mask the huge deficiencies of AI, or, more precisely, they mask AI experts’ huge deficiency in understanding human intelligence.

It’s no coincidence that many prominent AI experts are, how shall we say…socially awkward. (Listen to Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk talk for a few minutes for confirmation of this claim.) They have spent their lives in the digital realm, from coding to playing video games to posting on social media. Interacting with a computer is their primary activity, so they naturally limit their thinking about human intelligence to computer-based experiences. Yet human intelligence encompasses so much more than tasks that can be done on a computer.

What many promoters of imminent AGI miss is what computer scientist Peter Denning calls “tacit knowledge” in his new book, Turing’s Mistake: Escaping the Yoke of Unintelligent Machines. Tacit knowledge encompasses forms of human intelligence that can’t be explained with language. And since modern AI systems require words in order to be trained, these forms of knowledge simply can’t be grasped by AI, no matter how advanced it may be.

Denning breaks down tacit knowledge into various categories, one of which is common sense knowledge—that practical knowledge we all have that’s never explicitly taught or explicated, but is known by us nonetheless. In the 1980’s there was a project (called “Cyc”) to add all this common knowledge directly into a database. Even after over a million examples were added (such as “You can pull an object with a string, but you can’t push it with a string”), it became obvious that it was impossible to add everything that most people know intuitively.

Another type of tacit knowledge is comprised of our feelings and perceptions. Think of your female friend who knows your mood before you even say a word. Or the charismatic man who dominates any room he enters—everyone feels his presence immediately. Or try to explain your feelings about the color “blue” to a color-blind person. 

Social knowledge, including culture, is another form of tacit knowledge. People who grew up in the South know certain ways of saying and doing things that those who grew up in the Midwest don’t, and they can’t explain all those things; they just know them.

Tacit knowledge, in all its types, is a form of intelligence that’s far beyond the capabilities of modern AI, and the accepted definition of AGI doesn’t even begin to include these intellectual talents. 

This is what Pope Leo meant when he wrote in Magnifica Humanitas, “So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean.” Human intelligence is so much more than AI experts believe it to be.

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, is perhaps the world’s foremost authority on AGI. He described AGI last year as “a system that’s able to exhibit all the complicated capabilities that humans can,” and predicted it would happen within five to ten years (and he’s actually more pessimistic than many AI leaders). Clearly Hassabis has the common two-dimensional definition of intelligence undergirding his prediction. 

Does he really think an AI, in 2030 or even 2035, will be able to see the look on someone’s face and immediately know that person’s exact mood, precisely why they’re in that mood, and exactly what to say, like even an average wife can do with her husband? The most advanced AI today is light-years from that type of intelligence.

Are these just semantic arguments, given the major AI advancements likely coming around the corner? It’s true that AI is still advancing rapidly, and in five to ten years will be far more “intelligent”—however you define the term—than it is today. Yet a proper understanding of intelligence is vital in this debate, and it’s one that Catholics need to grasp more fully. 

While some Catholics want to hole up in their homes and attack all AI as unnatural, we can’t do that—it’s, ironically, a rejection of human intelligence and its ability to create tools that help us subdue the earth. Nor can we simply embrace the anthropologic errors of the AI experts by going along with their hype. By pretending that AI will soon meet, or even surpass, human intelligence, we’d diminish what it means to be human, reducing it to tasks on a computer. (Self-promotion time: This fall, my next book, The Catholic Guide to Artificial Intelligence, will provide Catholics with the tools to better understand and grapple with the AI revolution.)

We are fearfully and wonderfully made in the image and likeness of God, and so our intellects are, quite literally, touched by the divine. They are more than processing machines or pattern-recognition programs. They are a connection to Reality itself, which is God. That’s why they’re able to do things beyond the reach of science. No machine, no matter how well designed or programmed, can ever do that. No machine can know what new horizon of love is opened up when your grandchild is born. No machine can respond to someone’s grief from its own experience of loss. No machine can understand trusting God in times of darkness. 

Are major advancements in AI coming? Absolutely. But is AGI coming? Not unless you redefine intelligence in such a reductionist fashion that it excludes significant aspects of intellectual ability. 

The claims of imminent AGI are part bad anthropology, part marketing hype. Every advancement in the AI world, no matter how small, is met with promises of world-changing technology coming soon, since that makes for a good press release. But it also reveals a view of the human person—particularly the human intellect—that is greatly impoverished. The Catholic response should be not so much denigrating the impressive breakthroughs in human-created AI, but rather elevating and appreciating the abilities of our amazing and multi-faceted human intelligence.