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EA Created An AI That Taught Itself To Play Battlefield (kotaku.com)
Electronic Arts' Search for Extraordinary Experiences (SEED) Division has created a "self-learning AI-agent" that has managed to teach itself how to play Battlefield 1 multiplayer. From a report: In this blog post, Magnus Nordin from SEED details how his team, inspired by Google's work with old Atari games, wondered "how much effort it would take to have a self-learning agent learn to play a modern and more complex first person AAA game like Battlefield." So they tried to find out. The results are an "agent" that, while inferior to human players, "is pretty proficient at the basic Battlefield gameplay." The agent changes behaviour if it's low on health or ammo, and while more complex behaviours like knowing the details of each map are beyond it (at the moment), EA has found that "while the human players outperformed the agents, it wasn't a complete blowout by any stretch."
In a lot of ways you have hit at the crux of the AI problem. Another prominent example of this issue is with Automotive AI. We humans bring so much more information to the table besides the basics of how to drive a car and what a road/signs are. We have an ingrained knowledge of what another human being is going to do. We pick up subtle cues from the "body language" of other driver's and use that to inform decisions. That decision making process was created and honed in us as children when we had to understand the intent of our fellow humans. This array of knowledge informs everything we do in life and is, to use your own terms, a kind of "generic AI' that we all share. Its an interesting problem and begs the question: Is this kind of generic AI possible to create without also creating what is essentially a basic consiousness? After all, it is this basic knowledge and understanding that makes us thinking, aware creatures. Its quite a fantastic time to be alive, I can't wait to see what happens next.