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Embodiment is indispensable for AGI

keerthanapg.com

91–100 of 159 posts

Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI

#91

This is kind of a weird discussion. "Embodiment" here seems to mean "having a body," i.e. being able to perform motor tasks in the external world (as opposed to the way it's used in "Embodiment and the Inner Life" [1]). In that case, I don't think embodiment could ever be considered a necessary condition for AGI. But AGI would need to be able to learn motor tasks if given a body (in order to be called "general"). A d…

It’s all about learning causation. It may not be strictly necessary, but it’s damned useful. If you’ve ever tried to learn causation from observational data or from a randomized trial, you’ll know which one is incredibly easier. If you can’t affect the data, it’s worth a lot less. Like learning to play a game without actually engaging in exploration. It can technically be done, but it’s so much harder.

Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI

#92
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it's a bit far fetched but I'd go as far as to say that, by Occam's razor, the conscious experience does not exist. A world where the "conscious experience" does not exist would be indistinguishable from our world; ergo, the "conscious experience" does not exist.

A world where nothing but conscious experience exists and what you think as the world is simulated would be indistinguishable from your experience. Ergo, the “real world” does not exist.

By Occam's razor here, an un-simulated world ("real world") would be a more simple hypothesis because a simulation would require a simulator to be posited.

Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we are physical beings, and CPUs can simulate physics, then a CPU can experience everything that we experience, including "qualia". Do you think we're metaphysical beings, or that physics are beyond the capacity of a CPU to simulate?

This cannot possibly be true, because we have no concept of what qualia are. There is no objective external way to determine if an entity experiences qualia at all. From outside we can only consider behaviour, not subjective experience. Personally I can't be sure that anyone else experiences qualia. It seems like a reasonable assumption, but I'm basing that on a mapping from my own experiences to those of others. If…

I find it most satisfying to act as if self-consciousness, free will, and qualia are all effectively "illusions" that are emergent properties of sufficiently complex brains, that it's unlikely we'll ever resolve any of the Hard Problems, but that we will be able to construct machines that exhibit as much free will as humans. It doesn't resolve any really important problems, but at least it moves the discussion past "is qualia required for AGI", which clearly it isn't.

Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI

#94

This is kind of a weird discussion. "Embodiment" here seems to mean "having a body," i.e. being able to perform motor tasks in the external world (as opposed to the way it's used in "Embodiment and the Inner Life" [1]). In that case, I don't think embodiment could ever be considered a necessary condition for AGI. But AGI would need to be able to learn motor tasks if given a body (in order to be called "general"). A d…

"qualia" is the bikeshedding for any discussion on intelligence (biological or artificial). It's an unfalsifiable concept that's much easier to reach to than engaging in the concepts that are actually relevant to modern work in those fields. Posting this is a bit of trying to hold back the tide, because the dominant threads in HN AI/BI discussions are almost always horribly uninformed, but I'm posting this so that if…

I agree. You might as well replace the word "qualia" with "soul" and the argument stays exactly the same.

Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI

#95

Donna Haraway called from the 1990s, offers you a nickle...

I house-sat for Donna one summer. I really regret I never spent the time to tell her just how bad I think her books are. I spent about an hour trying to parse a paragraph in one of her books only to conclude she was basically saying "it's unclear whether creating mice that are prone to getting cancer is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing because it's all relative", which is fine, but don't make it some postmodern tripe.

Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Einstein developed his groundbreaking theories while working as a clerk in the Swiss patent office. Information and education today are even more accessible than it was back then. If research is banned from universities and companies, someone will eventually discover AGI in their basement.

Not necessarily. It's likely the energy budget to build AGI from scratch vastly exceeds the reach of your average hobbyist.

Today, perhaps. In 50 years? Maybe not. In 500 years, probably not.

Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we are physical beings, and CPUs can simulate physics, then a CPU can experience everything that we experience, including "qualia". Do you think we're metaphysical beings, or that physics are beyond the capacity of a CPU to simulate?

This cannot possibly be true, because we have no concept of what qualia are. There is no objective external way to determine if an entity experiences qualia at all. From outside we can only consider behaviour, not subjective experience. Personally I can't be sure that anyone else experiences qualia. It seems like a reasonable assumption, but I'm basing that on a mapping from my own experiences to those of others. If…

Sorry, but I like to work on problems that have solutions and not ones which are so ill-defined that they don't have _any_ satisfying solutions.

Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI

#98

Tesla FSD Beta has a body with sensors (cameras) and actuators (engine/wheels/steering). Does that count as embodiment?

If any device that humans build will obtain some level of AGI, it will be a car. Cars are in fact the most advanced devices humans have built- effectively they are telecomms, computer and power generation platforms that happen to have wheels attached. Cars continuously receive all sorts of rich inputs and we couple them to sophisticated communications and computing platforms ... to the point where the driver can often let the car assume many details of managing driving safety. Every new generation of car, we add more efficiency, computing capacity, networking capability, and the designers get feedback almost immediately.

Eventually, the full-self-driving folks will realize that to get the last 10% of human performance on the road, they'll need to make systems that have far more capability that we provide now (in terms of computing capacity, model complexity, neural net design) to handle those rare situations where a human is actually required to so some sophisticated reasoning to drive their car past a messy accident in the snow while inebriated people walk around.

I used to think that a TPU pod (or really, several clusters of TPU pods working in concert) would be the next step to AGI (demonstrating a combination of the best of all our current systems to the point that nobody even cares about the Turing Test anymore) but now I conclude that disembodied systems like that (with access to lots of archived data but not many real-time input streams) are more likely to become idiot-savants sitting around wondering WHY THE HUMANS WANT ME TO DRAW "A transparent sculpture of a duck made out of glass. The sculpture is in front of a painting of a landscape." AGAIN!?

Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"qualia" is the bikeshedding for any discussion on intelligence (biological or artificial). It's an unfalsifiable concept that's much easier to reach to than engaging in the concepts that are actually relevant to modern work in those fields. Posting this is a bit of trying to hold back the tide, because the dominant threads in HN AI/BI discussions are almost always horribly uninformed, but I'm posting this so that if…

Eh? I’m not surprised that AI researchers are not informed about the philosophy of mind, and I doubt that they need to be in order to do their work. But the quale is an important concept and just assuming it doesn’t exist because AI researchers don’t need it is a bit silly.

It's just not relevant. It's an ill-defined measure for something that (all due respect) makes philosophy majors feel like they're participating in something they're unqualified to participate in.

Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI

#100
This conclusion was sealed when they settled on the definition of AGI as being "as good or better than humans at things humans do", emphasis mine. Things humans do require embodiment.

The more interesting proposition (that I'm inclined to believe FWIW) is that "common sense" requires high-bandwidth interaction with an environment, complex inputs and outputs. The environment could be Reality, it could be a simulation, or it could be something totally other. In either case, the abilities the agent develops will make sense in that environment. If that's true, and if "human level common sense" is close enough to AGI by OP's definition (that's pretty close to what we mean in practice IMO), then OP is basically the special case of this argument where the environment is the real world.

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