“Only a small community has concentrated on general intelligence. No one has tried to make a thinking machine ... The bottom line is that we really haven’t progressed too far toward a truly intelligent machine. We have collections of dumb specialists in small domains; the true majesty of general intelligence still awaits our attack. ... We have got to get back to the deepest questions of AI and general intelligence ...” (Marvin Minsky as interviewed in Hal’s Legacy, edited by David Stork, 2000).


The editors' goal in creating this volume was to fill a gap in the scientific literature, providing a coherent presentation of a body of contemporary research that, in spite of its integral importance, has had a low profile. This body of work has not been given a name before, in this book they christen it “Artificial General Intelligence” (AGI). What distinguishes AGI work from run-of-the-mill “artificial intelligence” research is that it is explicitly focused on engineering general intelligence in the short term. We have been active researchers in the AGI field for many years, and it has been a pleasure to gather together papers from our colleagues working on related ideas from their own perspectives. In the Introduction we give a conceptual overview of the AGI field, and also summarize and interrelate the key ideas in the subsequent chapters.