This is definitely the case. My prior is relatively strong that intelligence is compact, at least for complex and general tasks and behaviours. Evidence for this comes from ML—the fact that the modern ML paradigm of huge network + lots of data + general optimiser being able to solve a large number of tasks is a fair bit of evidence for this. Other evidence is existence of g and cortical uniformity in general, as well as our flexibility at learning skills like chess, mathematics etc which we clearly do not have any evolutionarily innate specialisation for.
Of course some skills such as motor reflexes and a lot of behaviours are hardwired but generally we see that as intelligence and. generality grows these decrease in proportion.
This is definitely the case. My prior is relatively strong that intelligence is compact, at least for complex and general tasks and behaviours. Evidence for this comes from ML—the fact that the modern ML paradigm of huge network + lots of data + general optimiser being able to solve a large number of tasks is a fair bit of evidence for this. Other evidence is existence of g and cortical uniformity in general, as well as our flexibility at learning skills like chess, mathematics etc which we clearly do not have any evolutionarily innate specialisation for.
Of course some skills such as motor reflexes and a lot of behaviours are hardwired but generally we see that as intelligence and. generality grows these decrease in proportion.
What if we learn new domains by rewiring/specialising/developing new neural circuitry for them.
We have a general optimiser that does dedicated cross domain optimisation by developing narrow optimisers?