General AI

What is the point of having a General AI instead of highly-tuned(optimized) specialized software fit for the task?
I.e. the "human-like AI" vs domain-specific software

Machines can’t make the hard calls themselves yet, because they don’t understand morality. But Ken Forbus, an AI researcher at Northwestern, is trying to fix that. Using a “Structure Mapping Engine,” he and his colleagues are feeding simple stories—morality plays—into machines in the hope that they will grasp the implicit moral lessons. It’d be a kind of synthetic conscience. “You can use stories to beef up the machines’ reasoning,” Forbus says. “You can—in theory—teach it to behave more like people would.”