Most importantly, building a machine that can really communicate with us without giving it a body is obviously a dead end. If the point for Ray is mastering lan

Most importantly, building a machine that can really communicate with us without giving it a body is obviously a dead end. If the point for Ray is mastering language in AI, then I think Ian is right. Reading "Methaphors we live by" By George Lakoff really opened my mind on this subject. Mastering not only the forms of language, but the meaning, and so the concepts, requires an extensive amount of interaction with the world through a human body. Just think bout the development of a child that can't touch, hear, see, smell, or can't feel any emotion. What about his communication skills ? We do have exemples. It is an engineers dream that communication would be devoid of emotions, shared experience, and many other things fundamentally born from experience. We all know this to be false if we care to study a little about communication outside of the realm of engineering. AI may be possible without a human body, but if there is to be communication, then there is to be a body whatever its form, or a simple form of what we call a "self". In my (lacking) knowledge, embodied AI is the only branch of AI to have considered this deeply. Ian may be right. Maybe we rush to the conclusion without taking many things into account. Maybe this is the curse of a branch of CS that gave to much promises from the start. Then AI is probably too broad of a term. Some things in intelligence may be in our reach, some others not.