In this paper, we present a review of recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) towards the possibility of an artificial intelligence equal that of human intelligence. AI technology has always shown a stepwise increase in its capacity and complexity. The last step took place several years ago with the increased progress in deep neural network technology. Each such step goes hand in hand with our understanding of ourselves and our understanding of human cognition. Indeed, AI was always about the question of understanding human nature. AI percolates into our lives, changing our environment. We believe that the next few steps in AI technology, and in our understanding of human behavior, will bring about much more powerful machines that are flexible enough to resemble human behavior. In this context, there are two research fields: Artificial Social Intelligence (ASI) and General Artificial Intelligence (AGI). The authors also allude to one of the main challenges for AI, embodied cognition, and explain how it can be viewed as an opportunity for further progress in AI research.We end the discussion by demonstrating a way to overcome our fears of singularity, by the process of value alignment, which is expanded upon in Section 7.
The Human-Machine Eco-SystemFrom ancient myths of inanimate objects coming alive to the creation of artificial intelligence, philosophers, scientists, writers, and artists have pondered the very nature and boundaries of humanity. Humans are fascinated by machines that can imitate us but also feel an existential discomfort around them-an uneasiness that stems from their ability to obscure the line between the living and the inanimate.Claude Levi-Strauss [1] has examined how the individual process of constructing reality is related to how an entire society develops and maintains its worldview. He argued that the most common way in which both an individual and a community put together a structure of reality is through the use of binary categories. An individual makes sense of the world by organizing things in a series of dual oppositions such as dark/light, living/dead, feminine/masculine, emotion/logic, and so on, which lead to the community's development of more abstract concepts like, chaos/order, natural/unnatural, normal/abnormal, subjectivity/objectivity, and moral/immoral. Such a predetermined schema of reality provides the confidence people need to face the world and explore its boundaries.As far as our relationship to thinking machines is concerned, it seems that the worldview we have developed for ourselves over time has become pessimistic as the pace of technology development increased. While in the past automata have entertained us mainly because they mimicked human behavior in an inaccurate and ridiculous way that revealed the fact that it was a trick, artificially intelligent machines today can successfully mimic an increasing number of the human's traits, such as natural human language and thought patterns. These traits have always separated us from all the other living cr...