Why AGI could not be (just) a tool: goals, life, and general intelligence

Micah Lott*, William Hasselberger

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

It is widely believed that AGI has the potential to be a wonderful tool that humans can use to meet our needs, solve our problems, and improve our lives. Against this view, we argue that any entity with truly general, human-level intelligence would have the capacity to lead its own life, with its own purposes and integrated hierarchy of goals. And thus any true AGI could not be merely a tool, even if it turned out to be extremely helpful for human beings. If we are correct, there is a dilemma at the heart of the ambition to build AGI as a valuable tool. On the one hand, any mere tool that we might build would lack capacities essential to the kind of general intelligence exhibited by human beings; it would not be genuine AGI. On the other hand, were we to create genuine AGI, then what we would have created would not be a mere tool, but something more. In this paper, we make the case for this dilemma. In so doing, we illuminate the connections between a set of core ideas: intelligence, agency, tools, and life.

Original languageEnglish
Number of pages26
JournalInquiry (United Kingdom)
DOIs
Publication statusAccepted/In press - Dec 2024

Keywords

  • Artificial intelligence
  • Goals
  • Life
  • Teleology
  • Tools

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