Beyond the Octopus: From General Intelligence toward a Human-like Mind

General intelligence varies with species and environment. Octopuses are highly intelligent, sensing and rapidly learning the complex properties of their world. But as asocial creatures, all their learned knowledge dies with them. Humans, on the other hand, are exceedingly social, gathering much more complex information and sharing it with others in their family, community and wider culture. In between those extremes there are several distinct types, or levels, of reasoning and information sharing that we characterize as a metaphorical “ladder” of intelligence. Simple social species occupy a “rung” above octopuses. Their young passively learn the ways of their species from parents and siblings in their early lives. On the next rung, “cultural” social animals such as primates, corvids, cetaceans, and elephants actively teach a complex culture to their young over much longer juvenile learning periods. Human-level intelligence relies on all of those lower rungs and adds three more: information sharing via oral language, then literacy, and finally civilization-wide sharing. The human mind, human behavior, and the very ontology with which we structure and reason about our world relies upon the integration of all these rungs. AGI researchers will need to recapitulate the entire ladder to produce a human-like mind.