Eleven Roads to AGI — and Two That Don't Exist Yet
Spread the question "how do we build general intelligence" flat, and you get a road map. Eleven roads; nine under construction; two honestly marked: not yet started.
The mathematical road: fractals and entropy. Intelligence is compression — rebuilding the world from the shortest possible description. Its believers hold that the essence of intelligence is an algorithm; everything else is compute.
The biological road: evolution. Don't design the intelligence; design the environment that produces it, then wait. Slow — but it built a brain once.
The brain-structure road: copy the hardware. The entire cortex is a six-layer sheet tiled with one algorithm — replicate the structure first, then wait for the mind to emerge.
The empiricist road: Locke's blank slate. Everything comes from data. Today's deep learning is its extreme form.
The rationalist road: Descartes' innate ideas. The prior structure is built in; learning is calibration. Symbolism and knowledge graphs live here.
The analogy road: Hofstadter's claim — analogy is the core engine of cognition. Intelligence is jumping from one domain to another, and landing well.
The Bayesian road: belief is probability; learning is updating. Uncertainty is not the enemy; it is the language.
The evolutionary road: let populations, not individuals, learn. Genetic algorithms and open-ended evolution.
The embodied road: no body, no meaning. Intelligence was first a skill for moving in the world; thinking came later.
And the two roads not yet started are, of all things, the most human ones:
The Einstein road — leaping from sparse observations straight to universal principles, skipping all the data in between. No pipeline has ever produced special relativity; that was the product of a bicycle, a light beam, and a thought experiment.
The emotion road — not a reward function, but the origin of value. To this day we do not know why a machine would ever want anything.
The road map does not predict who arrives first. It only reminds us: the shortest road may not be the fastest, and the two roads humans walked themselves — no machine can walk them yet.
Eleven paths, the full map: https://psyverse.fun