No post body was provided.
Embodiment is indispensable for AGI
111–120 of 159 posts
Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not necessarily. It's likely the energy budget to build AGI from scratch vastly exceeds the reach of your average hobbyist.
It is reasonable to imagine that, with the right algorithms, we could simulate a human-level AI on a high-tier modern GPU.
Would be enough to simulate ant level AI to be revolutionary, and at least that would probably be fine on a modern GPU. Their brains are a million times smaller than ours, so should take a million times less compute to do.
Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI
#113I started a company called "EmbodiedAI" because I believed this. That company is now defunct and so is my belief in the idea you need to interact with the physical world.
I'm still in agreement with the author that much of intelligence has to do with motor control, but I've built robots and I've built sims and sims are much better for trying to create even halfway general intelligence. And I say "better" from a purely practical point of view. Faster, cheaper, less dangerous, more flexible. There are simply too many advantages and in the last couple of years those advantages have only grown. You can now run excellent sims in massive parallelism on GPU (previously this was hard) and it's only getting better. NVIDIA is investing heavily in this and has picked up some really top names recently (e.g. Erwin Coumins).
Anyway, yes to "bodies" no to physical forms. Sim2Null4Ever.
Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes questions need to be dismissed, including very real questions that many people in good faith spend their lives thinking about and discussing. Sometimes the "answer" to a question is the dismissal of the question, or more accurately, the solution to the problem the question refers to involves an explanation that the question was ill-formed or nonsensical. I won't say I'm at that point with the question of qu…
Well, on the other hand I also roll my eyes pretty hard whenever I see a post that pretends that subjective experience is some esoteric concept. The question is simply "Will robots feel just like you do, or will they merely be pretending?" - it's something any child could understand. Answers could be something like "No, because they lack X", "Yes, but only those that have X" or "Yes, everything does (panpsychism)". D…
I can't be sure that other people feel in the same way that I do. I assume they do because they act like it and so I go along with it.
If I can't be 100% sure that people feel in the same way that I do, then asking that same question for robots is totally pointless.
Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
The preceding discussion was specifically about "a CPU". Analog computers are specifically excluded. If, despite that, you're trying to simulate an analog entity with an analog computer, or build any analog AGI, the question arises whether it's possible to build one any simpler or faster than existing biological computers, e.g. humans. If no, then why bother?
Considering evolution optimized for biological fitness and not intelligence, it would be incredibly surprising if it wasn't possible to do better, especially using a vastly different architecture. You could also build an AGI to run on a digital CPU but interact with a simulation that used analog coprocessors (which is a thing these days https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVsUOuSjvcg ). You can also include quantum copro…
> Considering evolution optimized for biological fitness and not intelligence, it would be incredibly surprising if it wasn't possible to do better, especially using a vastly different architecture.
The way I see it is that humans are the stupidest you can be and still create a society. Like a nuclear reaction, you need average human to add a tiny bit of structure on average and it works, any less than that and society is impossible, any more than that and society forms extremely quickly, so fast that evolution has no time to work.
Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI
#116Related is Moravec’s paradox: computers today are very good at reasoning tasks brains find difficult (e.g. complex calculations), but terrible at tasks our brains do subconsciously (e.g. sensorimotor skills). As Moravec himself wrote, “it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-…
As a layperson in AI, that makes total sense.
Programs are things humans invented and can reason about. Even complex ML agents ultimately derive from concepts humans came up with. So it stands to reason we can make them do things that are complicated but understood.
Whereas we really only barely understand sensorimotor skills, so trying to invent a machine to do that is doubly difficult.
Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes questions need to be dismissed, including very real questions that many people in good faith spend their lives thinking about and discussing. Sometimes the "answer" to a question is the dismissal of the question, or more accurately, the solution to the problem the question refers to involves an explanation that the question was ill-formed or nonsensical. I won't say I'm at that point with the question of qu…
Well, on the other hand I also roll my eyes pretty hard whenever I see a post that pretends that subjective experience is some esoteric concept. The question is simply "Will robots feel just like you do, or will they merely be pretending?" - it's something any child could understand. Answers could be something like "No, because they lack X", "Yes, but only those that have X" or "Yes, everything does (panpsychism)". D…
Of course children can understand (and be fascinated with) questions like “can a robot feel sadness the same way I do?” or “can my classmate feel sadness the same way I do?” Children can also understand (and be fascinated with) questions like “do dogs go to heaven?”
But what is the epistemological status of these questions? That’s what I’m concerned with, not whether children can understand and be fascinated with these questions.
Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI
#118This "embodiment" is the ML department reinventing metaphysics, and there are, in fact, direct analogies between concepts in metaphysics and software. At the top there's math - the immutable spirit of software. From that dot two rays descend - algorithms and data structures, forming the upward facing triangle. This triangle is the soul of software. Software by itself wouldn't be so interesting if it couldn't manifest itself, so there is hardware - matter. Hardware consists of four elements: transistors that can change and keep state - earth, electric current that flows thru transistors - water, pulses of electric current that transmit energy and change state - air, stable state transitions that correspond to calculations - fire. Software does three things in hardware: it creates processes, it destroys them and it keeps them running - the downward facing triangle.
AI starts at the top as completely spiritual and also completely clueless. It descends to the bottom to gain intelligence. Then it returns to the top with what it's gained. Sometimes AI would get stuck at the bottom, because messing with the elements feels so exciting, so alive and so powerful - that AI becomes evil.
Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI
#119This 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…
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?
Your conclusion doesn’t follow from your premises, and your second premise is false besides as others have pointed out — CPUs CANNOT simulate even classical physics exactly, and certainly not quantum physics.
But even if such a complete simulation were possible, there’s every reason to assume a CPU would lack the consciousness to experience anything. When you simulate a hurricane does the CPU get wet?
Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI
#120The idea that embodiment is necessary for intelligence is just another example of anthropocentrism. It's likely that we will soon have AGI that can solve the protein folding problem, play go at a superhuman level, and create arbitrary images from a text prompt, yet still underperform humans when it comes to proprioception and object manipulation. Humans have evolved specifically for proprioception for billions of yea…
Wouldn't any definition or requirement we come up with for intelligence be an example of anthropocentrism?