The Anthropocentrism of Intelligence: Rooted Assumptions that Hinder the Study of General Intelligence

Abstract

We postulate that Artificial General Intelligence remains elusive because of numerous undisputed assumptions that are deeply rooted into the traditional understanding of intelligence. We claim that these assumptions shape an anthropocentric bias that prevents the development of a general theory of intelligence capable of explaining the behavior of not only human and machine intelligence, but also any other entity that exhibits intelligent behavior. The most important of these assumptions is the failure to recognize darwinian evolution as an intelligent entity despite the growing consensus about its superior capabilities to develop biological contrivances. In order to avoid underrating and neglecting evolution as intelligent, other assumptions must be dropped. Such is the case for the requirement of language, which is only relevant in social contexts. Moreover, the boundary of evolution as an agent distinguished from the environment is not well-defined, which suggests that agent boundaries are redundant in General Intelligence and results in an equal treatment of polymorphic robots and multi-agents, to name a few. By revealing these and other assumptions, we propose that human intelligence should be relieved from standing at the center of studies about General Intelligence.