Defining and Explorting the Intelligence Space
It provides a conceptual tool for researchers and philosophers to analyze intelligence, but is incremental as it builds on existing definitions without empirical validation.
The paper introduces a hierarchical framework called the intelligence space to define intelligence across natural and artificial forms, and applies it to explore advanced topics like the singularity and generative AI.
Intelligence is a difficult concept to define, despite many attempts at doing so. Rather than trying to settle on a single definition, this article introduces a broad perspective on what intelligence is, by laying out a cascade of definitions that induces both a nested hierarchy of three levels of intelligence and a wider-ranging space that is built around them and approximations to them. Within this intelligence space, regions are identified that correspond to both natural -- most particularly, human -- intelligence and artificial intelligence (AI), along with the crossover notion of humanlike intelligence. These definitions are then exploited in early explorations of four more advanced, and likely more controversial, topics: the singularity, generative AI, ethics, and intellectual property.