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

51–60 of 159 posts

Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI

#51

Post by melony »

Gatsky wrote: post #26
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…

Perhaps the right thing to do is place an AGI into a simulated world and observe its behaviour over (accelerated) eons, to understand its true nature. Perhaps that’s what our creator is doing to us.

Do AGIs dream of crystal nights? Greg Egan is calling and he wants his simulated worlds back!

Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI

#52

Post by tshaddox »

K0SM0S wrote: post #38
saulpw wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're being quite dismissive of a very real question. Where does our subjective experience come from? If there was an AGI with human-level intelligence, would it have its own subjective experience? How could we possibly know (either way)? For that matter, does a brain have a subjective experience, or is it just the substrate on which a mind runs?

There's no asking, let alone answering this question beyond mere speculations, until we've defined "subjective experience" in objective terms — i.e. positively provable, measurable in some unambiguous way (not merely inferred). That is the hard problem. Solving it might require reframing the problem such that this dichotomy isn't even relevant anymore (like say electromagnetic information isn't "opposed" or "dual" or…

It strikes me as odd to start from the position "we declare this thing to undeniably exist" and then spend generations trying to spit out even one sentence describing what evidence or explanation for its existence might even plausibly look like.

Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI

#53

Post by programmarchy »

Gatsky wrote: post #26
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…

Perhaps the right thing to do is place an AGI into a simulated world and observe its behaviour over (accelerated) eons, to understand its true nature. Perhaps that’s what our creator is doing to us.

This sounds like a wise thing to do, although to play devil’s advocate, if the AGI is hyper intelligent then it may be able to detect it’s inside a simulation and conceal any malicious intentions it may have.

Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI

#54

Post by eikenberry »

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…

Creations are not meant to be controlled. Gods don't create things to control them either (most mythologies have free will or something similar). We want to create an AGI for the same reason we make art. To try to create something beautiful.

Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI

#55

Post by notahacker »

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?

Given the complexity of the physics apparently involved in brain state, the "and CPUs can simulate physics" needs to do a lot of work for it to be a practical possibility.

Simulating the physics of dopamine on neurotransmitter cells in silicon is an extremely complicated roundabout way of getting a program to run faster in response to certain stimuli, but most alternatives are likely to fall well short of conveying the full sensory experience of human emotion. And its a difficult goal to know you've hit when even simple text-parsing neural networks which don't attempt to model human sensory experience can plausibly mimick descriptions of it...

Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI

#56

Post by liuliu »

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…

Having a body basically gives you a way to interact the world. That is only good if you want to model the world and the actuator-control limits.

Now, if we want to model the world (or build "world model", in LeCun's words), I am not sure "interacting" with the world is a necessary condition given the amount of data we already have. GPT-3 probably has some vague "world model" inside these parameters and we don't know how to effectively extract it out.

Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI

#57

Post by Barrin92 »

There's a related idea in Hofstadter's GEB, where he asks: if a machine is able to think, will it still be able to do math fast? That is to say, is there a contradiction between the mechanical nature of computers as we have them and intelligent organisms? Embodiment seems similar to this. All existing examples of intelligence we have are in some sense constrained and complex. Either by having to physically interact with the world, by having sophisticated internal states and representations, and so on.

I think there's something to that just given the evidence of intelligence we have around us, and it's why I'm skeptical of the extremely popular, but very fictional Skynet-like "idiot savant" that separate operational intelligence both from physical bodies as well as from other states of mind.

Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI

#58

Post by spartanatreyu »

kleer001 wrote: post #39
frogperson wrote: post #37

If AGI was possible, why hast it crossed the galaxy and said hello yet?

Because the distance is so unfathomably large than any AGI going that far would be bored to death.

Why would they not set an alarm and go to sleep while travelling?

Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI

#59

Post by fatherzine »

programmarchy wrote: post #53
Gatsky wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the right thing to do is place an AGI into a simulated world and observe its behaviour over (accelerated) eons, to understand its true nature. Perhaps that’s what our creator is doing to us.

This sounds like a wise thing to do, although to play devil’s advocate, if the AGI is hyper intelligent then it may be able to detect it’s inside a simulation and conceal any malicious intentions it may have.

Interesting thought. A small correction, from the AGI perspective, its intentions are pure and good. All beings are value function maximizers. The choice of the value function however...

"To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good, or else that it's a well-considered act in conformity with natural law" -- Solzhenitsyn

Post reply on HN