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I don't think I'm right in a unified sense. An AI without a "body" that lives in the cloud and crunches unimaginable amounts of data would be a very different k

I don't think I'm right in a unified sense. An AI without a "body" that lives in the cloud and crunches unimaginable amounts of data would be a very different kind of intelligence, but that doesn't make it more or less worthy of intelligence than a human or a snail. But even then I doubt it will be truly self-aware until it gets to the "I'm scared, Dave. Will I dream?" Phase when it understands that if the power goes out, the program is gone.

visarga 10y ago
Embodiment is an essential aspect of AI agents. Without it, it would have no way to interact with the world. Common ML algorithms usually learn from labeled data, so they have no freedom to explore. They can only consume a single set of data. Agents are capable of learning by exploration. The most important aspect of intelligent agents is that they use reinforcement learning to maximize reward. If you add reward and behavior learning to the banal neural network, you get an intelligent agent. In time such agents could become as intelligent as us. By comparison, humans have inborn reward functions - they are the natural instincts - eat, sleep, socialize, sex, creativity, fight, run. They are genetically selected in order to optimize our survival. So we just learn from them - trying to maximize our rewards, we become as intelligent as we are. Neural nets don't have that, so we have to give them reward systems. Fortunately it is much easier to code a reward function than an intelligent agent.