It's probably a mistake to assume that just because it's the way we do it that it has to be the way machines do it. Although that's usually the initial assumption. In the early days of flight most attempts were based on birds, similarly submersible vehicles were based on fish. We know now it's better to use propellers. It could be we just haven't found what is analogous to a propeller for the AI world.
The only general intelligence we know of is us. It stands to reason that the first step towards creating AGI is to copy the one machine we know is capable of that type of processing. Why doesn't our research focus on understanding and copying biological brains? Numenta did, with good results, but it isn't an industry trend.
The steps to learning to make aircraft didn't come from understanding how birds flap their wings. I can't imagine the kind of intelligence we consider general will be from study of how humans biologically think.
> Why doesn't our research focus on understanding and copying biological brains?
There's lots of basic research being done to better understand the biological brain. Progress is slow and steady, but the brain remains poorly understood at this point in time. Most applied research has pursued more pragmatic methods because these methods have had faster progress and proven more useful in practice.
I agree that machines won't necessarily have to do everything the same way we do things to be "intelligent". On the other hand, the concept of artificial general intelligence implies a machine that can perform all of the same functions a human can: "Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the intelligence of a (hypothetical) machine that could successfully perform any intellectual task that a human being can."[0]
And if you look at what humans do that we characterize as "intelligence", it's a substantial list of different functions: "Human intelligence is the intellectual capacity of humans, which is characterized by perception, consciousness, self-awareness, and volition. Through their intelligence, humans possess the cognitive abilities to learn, form concepts, understand, apply logic, and reason, including the capacities to recognize patterns, comprehend ideas, plan, problem solve, make decisions, retain information, and use language to communicate. Intelligence enables humans to experience and think."[1] If I take an engineering perspective and look at the list of functions that an AGI would have to perform to be an AGI, I would definitely want to give it more than a text-in, text-out interface so that it could have, for example, perception and volition.
For example, imagine a theoretical "AGI" that exclusively deals with a stream of text in (as human language) and a stream of text out (again, as human language). If you ask it any questions about its physical surroundings, it's either going to make things up (which isn't perception and therefore fails both at being useful and meeting the definition of intelligence above), or it's going to get information about its physical surroundings via some proxy that feeds it a linguistic stream of information about its surroundings. But it doesn't matter if it's getting perceptual information from a proxy or from more directly embedded sensory interfaces; if it's getting perceptual information and able to use it sensibly, then it's performing the function of perception. And in that case the proxy source of perceptual information may as well be considered part of the "intelligent" system.
These kinds of articles seem a bit silly to me, because they seem to imply that we should expect to be able to create a system which is "intelligent" but which only performs the function of understanding and producing meaningful language. But if you're only handling language, you're taking away all of the other functions that are part of the definition of "intelligence" above, which leaves you with a system which is far short of anything we'd consider "intelligent".
