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Embodiment is indispensable for AGI

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Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI

#71

Post by ImprobableTruth »

tshaddox wrote: post #40
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?

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)".

Do you care about potential AI suffering? If you care about animal suffering, the answer to the question would have pretty obvious and major ethical implications.

Now, I'm not convinced that humans can ever determine an answer, so I can understand thinking it's just navel gazing, but I imagine the same applies to knowing what happened before the big bang. I think it's quite evident that this doesn't mean either question is malformed.

Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI

#72

Post by andrewmatte »

benreesman wrote: post #15

People who think AGI means anything whatsoever are in my experience generally uncomfortable with the fact that all the goal-seeking behaviors they’re trying to see themselves in basically book down to sex drive. AGI is a feeling alright. You can even call it love in front of the kids.

I'm glad someone else is saying it: AGI will emerge from sexbots.

Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI

#73

Post by dinosaurdynasty »

Karellen wrote: post #49
FartyMcFarter wrote: post #19

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?

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. Whethe…

Who says computers have to be digital? Analog computers are already a thing.

Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI

#74

Post by MontyCarloHall »

Related 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-old when it comes to perception and mobility.”

Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI

#75

Post by afarrell »

olalonde wrote: post #64
afarrell wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

He did so in correspondence with people in the scientific community. If AGI is both banned AND normatively reviled, then there can be a powerful incentive to defect from a community that would develop AGI.

… or it becomes a tribalistic division and half the community of AI-knowledgeable people become more motivated to develop AGI for queen and country.

Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI

#76

Post by olalonde »

tshaddox wrote: post #52
K0SM0S wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI

#77

Post by tomcatfish »

olalonde wrote: post #67
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?

You can't possibly know. Just as you can't possibly know if anyone else experiences a subjective experience or if you're the only one who does. In practice, it is advisable to act as if agents who behave as if they had a subjective experience really do (people, AGIs, animals, etc.). Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

The concept of a philosophical zombie is outright incoherent under most formulations. The argument runs "What if everything was exactly like a universe where everyone had a mind except that no one had a mind?"

The answer is that one of these things is true: * P-zombies would write IDENTICAL papers about how they experience qualia but p-zombie land wouldn't * The mind has some effect on the universe you can detect, so P-zombie universe looks quite different

Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI

#78

Post by tomcatfish »

fatherzine wrote: post #59
programmarchy wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"The AI thinks it's good"

Then why wouldn't it conceal it's good goal from those evil humans who would stop it from achieving it?

Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI

#79

Post by teraflop »

melony wrote: post #51
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.

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

For those who don't get the reference:

A significant plot point in one of Egan's early (and excellent) novels, Permutation City, involves creating an accelerated, simulated world containing unicellular life, and waiting for it to evolve sentience through natural selection. Years later, Egan came to the conclusion that even if it was possible to perform such an experiment:

> I realised that anyone who actually did this would have to be utterly morally bankrupt. To get from micro-organisms to intelligent life this way would involve an immense amount of suffering, with billions of sentient creatures living, struggling and dying along the way. Yes, this happened to our own ancestors, but that doesn’t give us the right to inflict the same kind of suffering on anyone else. [1]

and he wrote another story, "Crystal Nights"[2], approaching the same idea from that perspective.

[1]: https://www.gregegan.net/PERMUTATION/FAQ/FAQ.html

[2]: https://www.gregegan.net/MISC/CRYSTAL/Crystal.html

Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI

#80

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

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?

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 everyone else was a highly sophisticated automaton I wouldn't know.

This creates a paradox. The only way to prove qualia exist would be to invent an objective qualia-ometer which would somehow measure subjective experience.

But of course my experience of the qualia-ometer would also be subjective, so the existence of qualia in others cannot be proven objectively.

You can imagine some kind of meta-technology which allowed qualia to be shared, so everyone could experience everyone else's experiences.

Not even that would be absolute proof because experience would still be subjective.

The point being - assuming you can throw cycles at this is looking at it from the wrong end of the telescope. It doesn't work like that because it can't work like that.

It's a much harder problem. (Which could be why it's called the Hard Problem.)

Worse, it just highlights that all of our experiences are qualia. There is nothing objective about anything we experience. What we think of as objective experience is really just stable shared experience.

You can make an argument that the more complicated, stable, surprising, and shared experience is, the more likely it is to be objective.

That's sort-of plausible and possibly a good rule of thumb. But it still doesn't really make the problem go away.

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