[HN Gopher] Embodiment Is Indispensable for AGI
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Embodiment Is Indispensable for AGI
Author : keerthanpg
Score : 39 points
Date : 2022-06-07 21:25 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (keerthanapg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (keerthanapg.com)
| benreesman wrote:
| People who think AGI means anything whatsoever are in my
| experience generally uncomfortable with the fact that all the
| goal-seeking behaviors they're trying to see themselves in
| basically book down to sex drive.
|
| AGI is a feeling alright. You can even call it love in front of
| the kids.
| fatherzine wrote:
| Correct. Without real stakes, no real intelligence. Now why on
| Earth would anyone want to build an embodied AGI, beats me.
| Actually, it doesn't beat me, it's the age old foolish pride that
| we'll be able to control our creation. We are not Gods, we won't.
|
| There should be international treaties with teeth to ban A(G)I
| research, like we do for uranium enrichment or (to a lesser
| extent) for gain of function research.
|
| What do we do instead? Lure every half capable star-eyed
| promising young person into spending their best years to bring
| forth the Nightmare. Some things never change, we'll always live
| in the long shadow of Adam & Eve.
| [deleted]
| 01100011 wrote:
| We already have several technological "cats out of the bag".
|
| One can go buy a CRISPR kit for $1,000 and perform gain of
| function studies in their garage.
|
| One could build an accelerator or neutron source to amass
| radiological materials.
|
| One could make dangerous drones that use basic pattern
| recognition to target specific people or groups
|
| There are plenty of dangerous technologies available to rogue
| actors these days. Embodied AIs are the absolute least of my
| concerns when it comes to dangerous technologies. I'm more
| worried about the guy in the Tesla robot leotard going crazy
| than I am about AI.
| Gatsky wrote:
| Perhaps the right thing to do is place an AGI into a simulated
| world and observe its behaviour over (accelerated) eons, to
| understand its true nature. Perhaps that's what our creator is
| doing to us.
| gran_colombia wrote:
| This is something I always thought. AGI must learn what simple
| ideas such as 'a thing' are, how to find a path (look at how
| arboreal species navigate) and how that relates to movement, etc.
| Our physical interactions with the world, as much as our senses,
| inform everything we do about the world.
|
| I do not understand why we would want AGI though. Seems like we
| already have humans for that.
| burlesona wrote:
| This is interesting because, if AGI does require embodiment it
| will be subject to much stronger physical limitations than
| present "digital-only" approaches are.
|
| To fully experience a human-centric world an agent will need a
| body not too different from humans, and will have all kinds of
| interesting power and weight constraints, and only be able to
| handle a certain volume of processing hardware. Thus they might
| not be as uncontrollably god-like as skynet.
|
| So the key question seems to be whether they are individual
| agents or networked.
| rektide wrote:
| Embodiment can be virtual. It can learn about place &
| environment & physicality through simulation. Ref: wikipedia
| page[1] on embodied cognition. I tend to think about embodiment
| as being about sensorial systems, things that can perceive an
| environment, have capabilities to act or move or alter the
| environment about them.
|
| At some point it might help to have real world physical
| manifestations. But for a long time we can kind of explore
| virtual bodies. Even when we do make robots with bodies, I
| expect their "brain" is likely to remain in the cloud. The
| bodies could act more like appendages or peripherals. But it
| would be interesting & I think valuable to start developing a
| physical sense of self.
|
| Anyone know any good sci-fi that touches upon this? Ancillary
| Justice has a neat AI (multi-)"character".
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_cognition
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_agent
| makin17 wrote:
| w01fe wrote:
| I think this ignores the fact that an agent can be meaningfully
| embodied in the internet, using APIs for sensors and actuators.
| OpenAI's training of large language models with reinforcement
| learning, recent retrieval augmented models and "chain of
| thought" reasoning are all meaningful steps in this direction in
| my opinion.
| planetsprite wrote:
| I think a philosophical comparison is the allegory of the cave.
| Could an image generation model, trained sufficiently,
| demonstrate an understanding of human anatomy as comprehensive as
| a human surgeon simply via extrapolating from pictures of bodies?
| They are seeing the "shadow" of the human body and its physical
| reality via a 2D image, can replicate it based on what they see
| it do and not do, but at what point is their visual replication
| indistinguishable from genuine physical understanding? Is there a
| certain point when the difference is irrelevant, as the shadows
| provide all the information they need? Or are there limits to
| extrapolation given the lack of restraints (i.e. a dataset
| includes manipulated images, low resolution vs high, etc not
| labeled properly)
| superb-owl wrote:
| This is kind of a weird discussion.
|
| "Embodiment" here seems to mean "having a body," i.e. being able
| to perform motor tasks in the external world (as opposed to the
| way it's used in "Embodiment and the Inner Life" [1]).
|
| In that case, I don't think embodiment could ever be considered a
| necessary condition for AGI. But AGI would need to be able to
| learn motor tasks if given a body (in order to be called
| "general").
|
| A deeper question, and one I don't see enough discussion of, is
| whether a certain kind of embodiment is necessary for AGI to
| "feel something." I don't think this question is definitively
| answerable, but it's super important. Can a CPU experience
| qualia? Or do you need something more "meaty" and analog? Does
| the material matter at all, or is consciousness (in the hard-
| problem sense) just a pattern of information?
|
| An even more interesting and relevant question might be - is
| "feeling" (i.e. having qualia) a necessary condition for AGI?
|
| [1] https://www.alibris.com/search/books/isbn/9780199226559
| heyitsguay wrote:
| "qualia" is the bikeshedding for any discussion on intelligence
| (biological or artificial). It's an unfalsifiable concept
| that's much easier to reach to than engaging in the concepts
| that are actually relevant to modern work in those fields.
|
| Posting this is a bit of trying to hold back the tide, because
| the dominant threads in HN AI/BI discussions are almost always
| horribly uninformed, but I'm posting this so that if anyone
| else who actually does work in those fields is reading this and
| wondering what on earth is going on, now you know you're not
| alone!
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| Eh? I'm not surprised that AI researchers are not informed
| about the philosophy of mind, and I doubt that they need to
| be in order to do their work. But the quale _is_ an important
| concept and just assuming it doesn't exist because AI
| researchers don't need it is a bit silly.
| narag wrote:
| _Can a CPU experience qualia?_
|
| The mind has a physical structure that supports it. We are
| still unable to understand a meaningful portion of that
| structure or replicate it.
|
| Creating a concept to speculate about a system that we have no
| objective knowledge, based on subjective experience is useless.
| The name is catchy for a song though.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| If we are physical beings, and CPUs can simulate physics, then
| a CPU can experience everything that we experience, including
| "qualia".
|
| Do you think we're metaphysical beings, or that physics are
| beyond the capacity of a CPU to simulate?
| snek_case wrote:
| Whenever I see "qualia" being discussed I just roll my eyes.
|
| Asking whether a CPU can experience qualia is kind of like
| asking if atoms can experience anything. The CPU is just the
| substrate on which software runs.
| saulpw wrote:
| You're being quite dismissive of a very real question. Where
| does our subjective experience come from? If there was an AGI
| with human-level intelligence, would it have its own
| subjective experience? How could we possibly know (either
| way)?
|
| For that matter, does a brain have a subjective experience,
| or is it just the substrate on which a mind runs?
| adastra22 wrote:
| Why does it matter?
| Isinlor wrote:
| It's impossible to not be embodied. Controlling CPU and other
| hardware like motherboard and computer screen is an embodiment.
|
| Why would moving physical objects like electrons by micro
| meters not be good enough, but by meters it would?
| romanows wrote:
| Sure, if you define AGI as needing to be able to perform all
| physical tasks that a physically median-or-better adult human
| could perform, maybe it needs to be embodied essentially by
| definition. I don't think the physical aspect is implied by
| "artificial" or "intelligence", and I would argue not by
| "general" either seeing as how it's modifying "intelligence".
|
| Also, think about humans who cannot accomplish physical tasks of
| this standard. Babies, elderly, disabled, malnourished, and maybe
| people who are just really lazy or defiant.
|
| I stopped reading at this point so sorry if the essay returns to
| this point and addresses it.
| [deleted]
| tahoeskibum wrote:
| Tesla FSD Beta has a body with sensors (cameras) and actuators
| (engine/wheels/steering). Does that count as embodiment?
| gpderetta wrote:
| Likely yes, although the article [1] says that's required, not
| sufficient.
|
| [1] well, the title, in the grand HN tradition I haven't of
| course actually read the article.
| jfk13 wrote:
| Are you suggesting that Tesla's FSD bears any relation to AGI?
| narag wrote:
| That's what I think too. It's not that a body is needed for
| building an AGI, but it's probably much easier to _develop_ one
| on top of whatever basic software that can control a "body" that
| interacts with the environment.
|
| Or maybe they can brute-force intelligence from a computer, I
| don't know.
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