Many of us have worked in jobs of a general sort, such as a grocery clerk or restaurant worker. Not much specialization is needed to perform efficiently in these jobs besides a good work ethic and some customer service skills. However, these are both traits which are usually learned as one grows up and interacts with other people. In contrast, traditional uses of artificial technology tend to be in very specialized fields, where nearly all the possible variables are known ahead of time to minimize surprises as the robot performs its functions.

Barney Pell, an Artificial Intelligence Researcher and CEO of Powerset, discusses general artificial intelligence as it stands at the present time and its immense potential for the future. In some cases, artificial intelligence has already replaced the jobs of humans in areas such as telephone customer service. This same popular model however could not yet be applied to something like stocking shelves at a grocery store.

The common approach to artificial intelligence would only program a machine to stack the cans in a way that would be stable. The idea with general artificial intelligence is that if a customer knocked over the pyramid of cans, the machine could sense both that the pyramid was gone and that the resources for the pyramid were still present, and realize either through experience or on-the-fly computation that the next logical move to take would be to reconstruct the pyramid.