Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Embodiment is indispensable for AGI

keerthanapg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 159 posts

Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI

#41

Post by abathur »

This takes embodiment (which I suspect is essential) to a place that feels weird to me.

When I say that I suspect embodiment is essential to AGI, I mean that I think a lot of people are basically presuming mind-body dualism. I mean that the GIs we know about have neural networks that extend out into their large physical bodies, and that there's a bit of hubris bound up in assuming that a neural network simulated on a cpu and connected to a camera can produce the same results as wetware with a whole nest of nerves connected to a meat-camera.

Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI

#42

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

narag wrote: post #17
superb-owl wrote: post #2

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…

Can a CPU experience qualia? The mind has a physical structure that supports it. We are still unable to understand a meaningful portion of that structure or replicate it. Creating a concept to speculate about a system that we have no objective knowledge, based on subjective experience is useless. The name is catchy for a song though.

It's hard to usefully speculate, but I don't think it's right to imply that it's an unimportant question either. Even putting aside the more out-there scenarios, we don't want to look back in 2100 and say "oops, AIs have had qualia for the past 25 years, and we've been real jerks to them".

Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI

#43

Post by afarrell »

olalonde wrote: post #35
fatherzine wrote: post #5

Correct. Without real stakes, no real intelligence. Now why on Earth would anyone want to build an embodied AGI, beats me. Actually, it doesn't beat me, it's the age old foolish pride that we'll be able to control our creation. We are not Gods, we won't. There should be international treaties with teeth to ban A(G)I research, like we do for uranium enrichment or (to a lesser extent) for gain of function research. Wha…

Nice theory but: 1) If AGI is possible, it will happen no matter what international treaties are in place. 2) AGI could do an unimaginable amount of good if it is benevolent. It seems a bit premature to stop all research just because you have a bad hunch about it.

Not if there are sufficient incentives to defect from the team trying to develop AGI and sufficient memetic defenses against someone doing so for nationalistic reasons.

Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI

#47

Post by UmbertoNoEco »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #28
Isinlor wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's impossible to not be embodied. Controlling CPU and other hardware like motherboard and computer screen is an embodiment. Why would moving physical objects like electrons by micro meters not be good enough, but by meters it would?

It's not micrometers vs meters, or electrons vs macro objects. It's primarily a matter of sensor density. That is, I feel my fingers move in a way that a CPU does not feel an electron move. When I speak, I experience far more than a CPU experiences writing some bits to some output ports. And so on. Does that mean that embodiment is required? No. But your definition of "embodied" misses the point of the discussion.

It's trivial to give a regular CPU better sensing than you in dozens of variables (pressure, temperature, voltage, CO concentration, etc), so your point is rather weak.

Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI

#49

Post by Karellen »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #19
superb-owl wrote: post #2

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…

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?

Alternatively, we are analogue beings made up of systems that appear to be best described by chaotic continuous non-linear math, and digital computers can roughly simulate physics to a given level of precision, which can be as fine as you care to make it… at the cost of ever increasing processing requirements. And the amount of physics involved in simulating a single human cell, like a neuron, is already vast.

Whether we can simulate a “large enough” physical system, in as much detail as is required, at a fast enough speed to produce any results in a meaningful timeframe, is an open question.

We don’t even know how big the simulation needs to be, in terms of neurons, to produce qualia. Or how we’d know if it were. Or how much detail/resolution is needed.

It’s like brute forcing the travelling salesman problem for a 10,000 node graph. Yeah, we know exactly how to do it with a digital computer. The math is simple. It’s just going to take longer than the heat death of the universe to get the answer.

Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI

#50

Post by grumpopotamus »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #19
superb-owl wrote: post #2

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…

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?

We can definitely simulate things approximately, but exact simulations are another matter entirely, and how much do you lose in the approximation? PBS spacetime discussed the intractability of simulating even one atom exactly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55c9wkNmfn0
Post reply on HN