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The paper seems to depend on this claim: > One of the leading critics was the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, who argued that computers, who have no body, no child
by alanbernstein 4y ago
The paper seems to depend on this claim:
> One of the leading critics was the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, who argued that computers, who have no body, no childhood and no cultural practice, could not acquire intelligence at all.
So, I don't understand how the argument is at all credible. We have computers that do this. They are called robots. It may be the case that the best route to AGI is to put a robot through childhood. It would need an advanced enough learning framework first. All ML research is currently hashing out what that might be.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y agoCan you show me a robot that grows incrementally?
- brianwawok 4y agoAlphaGo?
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y agoNot a robot.
- l33t2328 4y agoDo you mean in size? Surely you don’t think changing size has much to do with what makes humans intelligent.
- wizofaus 4y agoActually that's pretty much exactly the theory I've seen suggested a few times, Harold Klawans is a big believer for a start. He makes a good case in his books that human intelligence is very much the result of the fact that much of our brain growth occurs post-birth as our bodies increase in size, which makes us quite different from most other species. It's not just that our brains absorb knowledge as we grow into adults, but transform themselves radically in order to gain particular skills (particularly language processing).
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y agoThe folks who believe that a significant part of our cognitive function is rooted in our physical selves certainly believe that. There's even an entire book "Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought" by George Lakoff & Mark Johnson that argues that not just cognition but almost all of western Philosophy is grounded in our physical manifestation.
- alanbernstein 4y agoI can certainly imagine an electromechanical system comprised of 1) a "brain" which can grow without practical bound, exactly like data centers already do, which controls 2) a "body" which can be switched out for another at any time, to simulate physical growth. The same brain could even control multiple bodies simultaneously. Now, I'm not going to claim this will entirely enable AGI. But the base argument of "computers can not possibly have bodies" is nonsense.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y agoThe argument about childhood is specifically about incremental physical transformation being entangled with cognitive development. "switching out [bodies] at any time" is not in any sense equivalent.