Human-Level Artificial Intelligence? Be Serious!

I claim that achieving real human-level artificial intelligence would necessarily imply that most of the tasks that humans perform for pay could be automated. Rather than work toward this goal of automation by building special-purpose systems, I argue for the development of general-purpose, educable systems that can learn and be taught to perform any of the thousands of jobs that humans can perform. Joining others who have made similar proposals, I advocate beginning with a system that has minimal, although extensive, built-in capabilities. These would have to include the ability to improve through learning along with many other abilities.