Today's artificial intelligence is certainly formidable. It can beat world champions at intricate games like chess and Go, or dominate at Jeopardy!. It can interpret heaps of data for us, guide driverless cars, respond to spoken commands, and track down the answers to your internet search queries.

And as artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated, there will be fewer and fewer jobs that robots can't take care of—or so Elon Musk recently speculated. He suggested that we might have to give our own brains a boost to stay competitive in an AI-saturated job market.

But if AI does steal your job, it won't be because scientists have built a brain better than yours. At least, not across the board. Most of the advances in artificial intelligence have been focused on solving particular kinds of problems. This narrow artificial intelligence is great at specific tasks like recommending songs on Pandora or analyzing how safe your driving habits are. However, the kind of general artificial intelligence that would simulate a person is a long ways off.

"At the very beginning of AI there was a lot of discussion about more general approaches to AI, with aspirations to create systems…that would work on many different problems," says John Laird, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan. "Over the last 50 years the evolution has been towards specialization."

Still, researchers are honing AI's skills in complex tasks like understanding language and adapting to changing conditions. "The really exciting thing is that computer algorithms are getting smarter in more general ways," says David Hanson, founder and CEO of Hanson Robotics in Hong Kong, who builds incredibly lifelike robots.

And there have always been people interested in how these aspects of AI might fit together. They want to know: "How do you create systems that have the capabilities that we normally associate with humans?" Laird says.

So why don't we have general AI yet?

There isn't a single, agreed-upon definition for general artificial intelligence. "Philosophers will argue whether General AI needs to have a real consciousness or whether a simulation of it suffices," Jonathan Matus, founder and CEO of Zendrive, which is based in San Francisco and analyzes driving data collected from smartphone sensors, said in an email.

But, in essence, "General intelligence is what people do," says Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle, Washington. "We don't have a computer that can function with the capabilities of a six year old, or even a three year old, and so we're very far from general intelligence."

Such an AI would be able to accumulate knowledge and use it to solve different kinds of problems. "I think the most powerful concept of general intelligence is that it's adaptive," Hanson says. "If you learn, for example, how to tie your shoes, you could apply it to other sorts of knots in other applications. If you have an intelligence that knows how to have a conversation with you, it can also know what it means to go to the store and buy a carton of milk."