Eliezer Yudkowsky writes "The Singularity Institute has released a draft of the paper "Levels of Organization in General Intelligence", to appear as a chapter in "Real AI: New Approaches to Artificial General Intelligence" (Goertzel and Pennachin, eds., forthcoming). A flat-file version is available (382K).
Everyone has been patiently waiting for science to cough up a general theory of intelligence. This paper contains the Singularity Institute's shot at the problem. The paper's goals are to describe intelligence as a complex supersystem of interdependent, internally specialized subsystems; to structure our understanding of cognition using levels of functional organization; and to integrate our understanding of general intelligence with our understanding of neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and evolutionary theory. The final part of the paper also includes a discussion of recursive self-improvement and seed AI."
