I’ve always been quite skeptical of philosophers arguing that a given potential scientific achievement is impossible; logic alone cannot be used to answer pract

I’ve always been quite skeptical of philosophers arguing that a given potential scientific achievement is impossible; logic alone cannot be used to answer practical questions like these, much though philosophers would like to claim this field. On to concrete criticisms, most of this article is irrelevant; you can skip straight to the last few paragraphs as the arguments there are largely unsupported and stand on their own: > Conclusion: computers are not in the world The main thesis of this paper is that we will not be able to realize AGI because computers are not in the world. I think it’s a valid criticism of the current breed of ANI algorithms, and is a problem that we will need to address (though it might turn out to be less of a problem than the author thinks). But to claim that computers will _never_ inhabit the world, and are logically incapable of doing so, seems trivially refutable to me. Why can’t an AGI have a childhood wired up to a robotic body, where it interacts with people and the world, thereby learning a tacit model of physical and social causality? Currently this might be science fiction, but to say it cannot happen in a hundred, or a thousand years seems arrogantly certain to me, and to claim it is logically impossible is to be epistemologically confused.