I expect that as we improve machine intelligence more and more, aside from the fact that we will simply keep moving the goalposts of what we consider "intellige

I expect that as we improve machine intelligence more and more, aside from the fact that we will simply keep moving the goalposts of what we consider "intelligent" like the irascible scamps we are, we're going to discover that embodiment is absolutely necessary. Not just any embodiment either, but we will need to place the neural networks in bodies very much like our own. Neuroscience continues to find surprising things that link our "general human intelligence" to our bodies. Paralyze a face and a person becomes less able to feel happiness or anger, eventually forgetting what feeling those things even meant, as one example. We shouldn't forget that the mind/body split is a wholly artificial construct that has no basis in reality. The brain is not contained in the head. The nerves running down your spine and out to your toes and all over your body are neurons. Exactly the same neurons, and directly connected to the neurons, that make up what we think of as the separate organ 'the brain'. They're stretched out very long, from head to toe, sure, but they are single cells, with the exact same behavior and DNA, and there is no reason to presume that they must have some especially insignificant role in our overall intelligence. Then there is the fact that it is probably reasonable to presume that a machine which has human-level intelligence will not appear overnight. It would almost necessarily go through long periods of development. During that development, when the machine begins to behave in ways the designers are not able to understand, what will be their reaction? Will they suppose that maybe the machine had intentions they were unaware of, and that it is acting of its own volition? Or will they think the system must be flawed, and seek to eliminate the behavior they didn't expect or understand? I have a hard time imagining that an AI system will be trained on image classification and one day suddenly say "I am alive" to its authors or users. If it instead performs poorly on the image classification because it is pondering the beauty of a flower in one of the images, what are the chances that nascent quasi-consciousness would be protected and developed? I think none. We only have vague ideas about intelligence and consciousness and our ideas about partial intelligence are utterly theoretical. Has there ever been a person who was 1% intelligent? Is mastering checkers, or learning NLP to exclusion of even proprioception 1% of human intelligence? You optimize for what you measure... and we don't know how to measure the things we're looking for.