That's a fair point. We certainly lack a measure of rigor in terms of defining intelligence and AGI - especially in the vernacular sense and among the lay public. But among people who work on this stuff, there are useful definitions that are widely used - if not universally accepted as "the" definition.
I would say that the material from Chapter 4 of Engineering General Intelligence - Volume 1[1] by Ben Goertzel reflects a pretty spirited and useful attempt to capture the important details, at least vis-a-vis the discussion at hand.
Excerpt:
Many attempts to characterize general intelligence have been made; Legg and Hutter [LH07a] review over 70! Our preferred abstract characterization of intelligence is: the capability of a system to choose actions maximizing its goal-achievement, based on its perceptions and memories, and making reasonably efficient use of its computational resources [Goe10b]. A general intelligence is then understood as one that can do this for a variety of complex goals in a variety of complex environments. However, apart from positing definitions, it is difficult to say anything nontrivial about general intelligence in general. Marcus Hutter [Hut05a] has demonstrated, using a characterization of general intelligence similar to the one above, that a very simple algorithm called AIXI can demonstrate arbitrarily high levels of general intelligence, if given sufficiently immense computational resources. This is interesting because it shows that (if we assume the universe can effectively be modeled as a computational system) general intelligence is basically a problem of computational efficiency. The particular structures and dynamics that characterize real-world general intelligences like humans arise because of the need to achieve reasonable levels of intelligence using modest space and time resources.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Engineering-General-Intelligence-Part...
I would say that the material from Chapter 4 of Engineering General Intelligence - Volume 1[1] by Ben Goertzel reflects a pretty spirited and useful attempt to capture the important details, at least vis-a-vis the discussion at hand.
Excerpt:
Many attempts to characterize general intelligence have been made; Legg and Hutter [LH07a] review over 70! Our preferred abstract characterization of intelligence is: the capability of a system to choose actions maximizing its goal-achievement, based on its perceptions and memories, and making reasonably efficient use of its computational resources [Goe10b]. A general intelligence is then understood as one that can do this for a variety of complex goals in a variety of complex environments. However, apart from positing definitions, it is difficult to say anything nontrivial about general intelligence in general. Marcus Hutter [Hut05a] has demonstrated, using a characterization of general intelligence similar to the one above, that a very simple algorithm called AIXI can demonstrate arbitrarily high levels of general intelligence, if given sufficiently immense computational resources. This is interesting because it shows that (if we assume the universe can effectively be modeled as a computational system) general intelligence is basically a problem of computational efficiency. The particular structures and dynamics that characterize real-world general intelligences like humans arise because of the need to achieve reasonable levels of intelligence using modest space and time resources.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Engineering-General-Intelligence-Part...