Thinking aloud:

Humans are examples of general intelligence - the only example we're sure of. Some humans have various degrees of autism (low level versions are quite common in the circles I've moved in), impairing their social skills. Mild autists nevertheless remain general intelligences, capable of demonstrating strong cross domain optimisation. Psychology is full of other examples of mental pathologies that impair certain skills, but nevertheless leave their sufferers as full fledged general intelligences. This general intelligence is not enough, however, to solve their impairments.

Watson triumphed on Jeopardy. AI scientists in previous decades would have concluded that to do so, a general intelligence would have been needed. But that was not the case at all - Watson is blatantly not a general intelligence. Big data and clever algorithms were all that were needed. Computers are demonstrating more and more skills, besting humans in more and more domains - but still no sign of general intelligence. I've recently developed the suspicion that the Turing test (comparing AI with a standard human) could get passed by a narrow AI finely tuned to that task.

The general thread is that the link between narrow skills and general intelligence may not be as clear as we sometimes think. It may be that narrow skills are sufficiently diverse and unique that a mid-level general intelligence may not be able to develop them to a large extent. Or, put another way, an above-human social intelligence may not be able to control a robot body or do decent image recognition. A super-intelligence likely could: ultimately, general intelligence includes the specific skills. But his "ultimately" may take a long time to come.

So the questions I'm wondering about are:

1. How likely is it that a general intelligence, above human in some domain not related to AI development, will acquire high level skills in unrelated areas?
2. By building high-performance narrow AIs, are we making it much easier for such an intelligence to develop such skills, by co-opting or copying these programs?