Embodiment is indispensable for AGI
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Embodiment is indispensable for AGI
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Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI
#2This 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 deeper question, and one I don't see enough discussion of, is whether a certain kind of embodiment is necessary for AGI to "feel something." I don't think this question is definitively answerable, but it's super important. Can a CPU experience qualia? Or do you need something more "meaty" and analog? Does the material matter at all, or is consciousness (in the hard-problem sense) just a pattern of information?
An even more interesting and relevant question might be - is "feeling" (i.e. having qualia) a necessary condition for AGI?
Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI
#3Sure, if you define AGI as needing to be able to perform all physical tasks that a physically median-or-better adult human could perform, maybe it needs to be embodied essentially by definition. I don't think the physical aspect is implied by "artificial" or "intelligence", and I would argue not by "general" either seeing as how it's modifying "intelligence".
Also, think about humans who cannot accomplish physical tasks of this standard. Babies, elderly, disabled, malnourished, and maybe people who are just really lazy or defiant.
I stopped reading at this point so sorry if the essay returns to this point and addresses it.
Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI
#4This 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 anyone else who actually does work in those fields is reading this and wondering what on earth is going on, now you know you're not alone!
Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI
#5Correct. 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.
What do we do instead? Lure every half capable star-eyed promising young person into spending their best years to bring forth the Nightmare. Some things never change, we'll always live in the long shadow of Adam & Eve.
Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI
#6This 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…
Whenever I see "qualia" being discussed I just roll my eyes.
Asking whether a CPU can experience qualia is kind of like asking if atoms can experience anything. The CPU is just the substrate on which software runs.
Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI
#7A computer will never be intelligent if it’s composition cannot adapt for survival without an entire society acting as the endoskeleton
Humans missing chunks of their brain can go on to get graduate degrees: https://www.wired.com/story/she-was-missing-a-chunk-of-her-b...
us-east goes down and society takes the day off.
The hope is we’ll blindly believe the financed machines programmed by financed experts aren’t just a titillating distraction from the same old; of course they’re objective! Pay the bill to keep my stock up…err I mean maintain objectivity.
Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI
#8I think this ignores the fact that an agent can be meaningfully embodied in the internet, using APIs for sensors and actuators. OpenAI's training of large language models with reinforcement learning, recent retrieval augmented models and "chain of thought" reasoning are all meaningful steps in this direction in my opinion.
Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI
#9I think a philosophical comparison is the allegory of the cave. Could an image generation model, trained sufficiently, demonstrate an understanding of human anatomy as comprehensive as a human surgeon simply via extrapolating from pictures of bodies? They are seeing the "shadow" of the human body and its physical reality via a 2D image, can replicate it based on what they see it do and not do, but at what point is their visual replication indistinguishable from genuine physical understanding? Is there a certain point when the difference is irrelevant, as the shadows provide all the information they need? Or are there limits to extrapolation given the lack of restraints (i.e. a dataset includes manipulated images, low resolution vs high, etc not labeled properly)
Re: Embodiment is indispensable for AGI
#10Sure, if you define AGI as needing to be able to perform all physical tasks that a physically median-or-better adult human could perform, maybe it needs to be embodied essentially by definition. I don't think the physical aspect is implied by "artificial" or "intelligence", and I would argue not by "general" either seeing as how it's modifying "intelligence". Also, think about humans who cannot accomplish physical ta…
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