A Case for Specialisation in Non-Human Entities
This work addresses the problem of balancing generality and specialization in AI development for researchers and practitioners, but it is incremental as it builds on existing critiques without introducing new methods.
The paper argues for specialization over generality in non-human AI systems by reviewing pitfalls of generality and highlighting industrial value, proposing arguments from robustness to cultural evolution, and advocating for specified governance to address safety gaps.
With the rise of large multi-modal AI models, fuelled by recent interest in large language models (LLMs), the notion of artificial general intelligence (AGI) went from being restricted to a fringe community, to dominate mainstream large AI development programs. In contrast, in this paper, we make a case for specialisation, by reviewing the pitfalls of generality and stressing the industrial value of specialised systems. Our contribution is threefold. First, we review the most widely accepted arguments against specialisation, and discuss how their relevance in the context of human labour is actually an argument for specialisation in the case of non human agents, be they algorithms or human organisations. Second, we propose four arguments in favor of specialisation, ranging from machine learning robustness, to computer security, social sciences and cultural evolution. Third, we finally make a case for specification, discuss how the machine learning approach to AI has so far failed to catch up with good practices from safety-engineering and formal verification of software, and discuss how some emerging good practices in machine learning help reduce this gap. In particular, we justify the need for specified governance for hard-to-specify systems.