How Low-Dimensional Is Intelligence?

If we only trained students in math, and then assigned students best at math to learn our most important jobs, that might go pretty well. After all, humans who best learn math tend to be well able to learn many hard tasks, and we can judge math ability unusually well. However a nation would not get rich by mainly training its people in math, and trying to sell math consulting to the world. After all, total world demand for math consulting is quite low, far too small to support a nation. And productivity spillovers from math to other professions seem too low to justify this strategy.This difference is related to a key long-debated AI question that I recall from when I first started to learn AI in 1984: if we train AIs to be “super”-intelligent in just a few key areas, are they then “super-intelligent” in general, finding it far easier to learn to do most any other tasks? Or must high levels of AI development efforts be put into a great many different topic areas in order to create AIs…

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