NLP to understand dialogue and actions that need to be taken based on what NPC's/quests/item descriptions say, strategies for several different enemies with different strengths and weaknesses, exploring the open world in a logical order.
When you think about the difficulties of such a loosely defined problem, it's hard to buy into the real-world fears of AI.
People should be a lot more concerned with whether or not their job rises to the level of "dumb as a worm".
They are but there are pills to fix the outcome of that.
My belief is that one day, in the not too distant future, we'll be saying that it's hard to believe we ever considered such things difficult for AI.
Consider that an AI can literally keep "reloading the last save file" indefinitely and simply try different commands until it finds one that advances the game successfully. A little bit of guided learning to confirm that its doing well, and suddenly you've got an AI that plays Skyrim.
And if you give a monkey a typewriter he will eventually write the complete works of shakespeare and if you play the powerball enough you'll eventually hit a $1.5 Billion dollar jackpot but there are easier ways to read Shakespeare and more profitable ways to get a billion dollars.
What makes humans (specifically their brains and the brains of other species) so powerful is it doesn't need hundreds at attempts at playing pacman or Skyrim before it wins. There are definitely applications where it's not unreasonable to expect an AI to have the correct answer to most possibilities at its disposable (handwriting detection, for instance) but the most useful applications will be if/when AI can solve problems that rarely have similar inputs (global economics, for instance).
The average human is terrible at playing Skyrim, Pac-Man, and video games in general. Someone who has never even looked at a computer will have a hard time playing Skyrim or any other video game without many hours of practice. And, most video games draw upon stuff that humans already know, like moving around in a physical world, and a concept of self, which gives them a huge advantage over AI right from the start.
I've been walking for 28 years and I still trip sometimes. That's almost 31,000 hours of practice, if we assume an average of just 3 hours of basic movement per day. Even going to the bathroom counts.
And when it comes to image/object recognition, I've had 163,000+ hours of practice. And I still see stuff I don't recognize plenty of times. Hell, optical illusions still fuck me up.
Now just imagine what an AI could do with that much practice/data.
What context does an AI have for knowing what it even means to advance the game? A game like Skyrim carries a HUGE baseline assumption that the player is familiar with what it's like to be a human being, living in a human culture rich with history and conflict.
Imagine trying to teach a jellyfish how to play Skyrim. That's kind of where we're at right now.
Whatever context we decide that it has. We can guide it to prefer scenarios where the character doesn't die, or go as deep as having it rate its own results with a weighted scale.
> Imagine trying to teach a jellyfish how to play Skyrim. That's kind of where we're at right now.
The difference is that we don't have the ability to both redefine the jellyfish's goals and modify how it controls its interactions with the world.
Then we're not really talking about AGI anymore, but a Skyrim-playing engine. Do you see the difference? A human being didn't evolve to play Skyrim, so building your AI with specific knowledge of Skyrim is cheating.
A proper AI should be able to learn to play Skyrim just as well as it could learn to play Chess or Super Mario Bros or any other video game we throw at it, including games not invented until after the AI is written. This is much, much harder than building something that can just play Skyrim.
Another way to play "successfully" is to edit memory locations and spoof protocol packets, set inventory=full, score=MAX_SCORE and level position= $LAST_LEVEL and declare yourself the winner.
Unless and until we can encode 'play by our rules, uphold our values' into an AI - they won't. A real-world fear is that we build AI without encoding 'care about human life, self-determination, bodily integrity, freedom of thought and movement, environmental surroundings, etc.' into it right from the start.
What about a rule that says "follow the rules."
If it actually figured out how to execute arbitrary code via button presses (humans have done this in Super Mario World), then we should patch the bug and restart the experiment.
Of course, an AI gaining control over the real world is a different matter, because in that case it may be too late to restart the experiment.