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Embodiment being a killer feature for AGI seems weird to me. For the record, I have just argued in a different thread, that this stuff is not needed for "AGI",

Embodiment being a killer feature for AGI seems weird to me. For the record, I have just argued in a different thread, that this stuff is not needed for "AGI", at least not the way I perceive it as being defined. And I believe that way is consistent with others in the field. But... if you'll allow my use of the distinction between "human level" intelligence and "human like" intelligence, then I will say that I think embodiment is important to the latter. Why? Because I believe a lot of our learning is experiential, and especially the learning that yields a lot of our very basic "model of the world" ideas. Take our "intuitive metaphysics" - there are objects in the world. Objects can't be in two different places at the same time. Two objects can't be in the same place at the same time. Etc. etc. And likewise our "intuitive epistemology" which we use to decide what things are true, and so on. I believe that it will be very difficult (although perhaps not impossible) to give an AI very human like equivalents to these things, as well as "intuitive physics" (things fall over when they're off balance, you can't stand a pencil up on it's sharpened point, etc.) without having it "experience" a lot of these things. Now the really interesting spin on that is whether or not a virtual body in a simulation would suffice to a degree. If you built a really hyper-realistic "fake world" using a really advanced game engine with somewhat realistic physics and what-not, and "put" the AI "in" that world... maybe it would learn some, or most, or even all, of what we learn. I doubt it would be "all", but who knows?

godelski 6y ago
> the distinction between "human level" intelligence and "human like" intelligence I 100% agree with this and think it is a important distinction. I'm glad you brought it up. One of my hobbies has been reading a lot of linguistics and about languages. There's the whole linguistic relativism topic at hand. When you learn just a little about linguistics you find that embodiment is embedded into our language, as the last sentence gave an example of (the use of "hand," which was likely unnoticed). There are lots of cultural references (especially with Americans) that make things more difficult too. Much of our language is dependent upon this multi-agent factor (I'd argue that language itself was born because we are social creatures). There's general language patterns that arise because of embodiment, environment, and culture. This affects the way we think. So I think this distinction between "human level" and "human like" is an important one. If AGI is not trained in a similar fashion to human growth and history it would have very different thinking styles, wants, and needs. But that wouldn't prevent it from being hyper-intelligent. I'll leave with an overly simplified saying > If a lion could speak, I would not understand it.

godelski 6y ago

> the distinction between "human level" intelligence and "human like" intelligence I 100% agree with this and think it is a important distinction. I'm glad you brought it up. One of my hobbies has been reading a lot of linguistics and about languages. There's the whole linguistic relativism topic at hand. When you learn just a little about linguistics you find that embodiment is embedded into our language, as the last sentence gave an example of (the use of "hand," which was likely unnoticed). There are lots of cultural references (especially with Americans) that make things more difficult too. Much of our language is dependent upon this multi-agent factor (I'd argue that language itself was born because we are social creatures). There's general language patterns that arise because of embodiment, environment, and culture. This affects the way we think. So I think this distinction between "human level" and "human like" is an important one. If AGI is not trained in a similar fashion to human growth and history it would have very different thinking styles, wants, and needs. But that wouldn't prevent it from being hyper-intelligent. I'll leave with an overly simplified saying > If a lion could speak, I would not understand it.