Derek, Thanks for your thoughts. V. welcome.
It’s impossible to reply properly in a brief note, which is all I have time for now. But there is a coherent philosophy behind the ideas I’m putting forward – and I’m v. confident it provides the broad way forward for developmental robotics and AGI robotics. The part you’re referring to, is that graphics/icons/flluid schemas - of which there are myriad external physical examples in our culture - are the basic form of concepts/language – and are not just lines/outlines on a page or in the brain’s processing, but simultaneously lines/outlines of action and thought. GO TO THE KITCHEN is represented in the brain in form of outlines, which then form the basis for an AGI/robot to pursue a line of action. Study how we graphically represent these concepts – study pictograms, ideograms and diagrams – and you get an idea of how the brain must work. Re the order of development, we have to realise that reflective thought – wh. is what most AI-ers begin with – is something that comes much later in development. First we have to build a robot that can act in the world - a robot that could reflect on, let alone discuss, its past actions, is a target wa-a-a-a-y into the future. The general assumption in AI is that intelligence begins with intellectual reflection. No it begins with physical action, and solving the immediate practical problems involved. Intellectual reflection can only flow from it, not the other way round – and the whole of evolution is testimony to that. From: Derek Zahn Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2013 4:38 PM To: AGI Subject: RE: [agi] The many different types of embodiment Personally, I think this (along with epigenetic robotics) has the most promise of any academic AI study area. I certainly don't think it is the only way to achieve significant success; my preference for this kind of approach is purely pragmatic. I'm sure it is possible to hand-code a sufficiently broad and robust foundational concept set to serve as the basis for general-purpose conceptual modeling of the world, but it seems really hard to me, since those basic concepts appear to be quite complicated and not very penetrable by introspection. And if a conceptual system needs to be learned nearly "from scratch", the question is how. I think a simulated world could work fine, but coming up with a simulator providing the richness of detail needed seems way harder than building a decent robot -- which is not to say that building good robots is easy -- just that high-fidelity virtual reality is really hard. Learning from scratch using just text might be possible but I don't see how to do it. "Grounding problem" is a glib reason given for why, but it pays to be more specific than that... So much human thought is based on metaphorical projection of spatial concepts, which we acquire from interaction with physical objects in physical space, and their causal interactions -- and on those terms they seem to only make sense with respect to world-modeling methods that are quite different from the logical (etc) abstract world models we build on top of the physical. It is kind of mysterious to me why this works so well... Why should useful abstract conceptual domains map so well onto concrete physical conceptual domains? I call this "the unreasonable effectiveness of metaphor", and hope someday to understand it. A lot of it comes from common properties of causality; a lot comes from the also somewhat mysterious effectiveness of mathematics; and a lot comes from the way we cherry-pick abstractions we are capable of effectively thinking about in those terms... But there is a deeper issue here too, though it is rather orthogonal to AGI per se. My own slow and intermittent work involves exploring these types of issues so you could probably put me in the developmental robotics camp, although I find such research to be fraught with the same potential for methodological boneheadedness as other approaches to AI -- it's just harder to see them in foresight than in hindsight. When reading papers about this work, be vigilant for oversimplifications, questions of "ability to scale" (see e.g. Subsumption for past failures in sexy robotics efforts that overlook or hand-wave on such questions) -- as well as the usual problems of researchers (subconsciously) filling in more than is really there, and avoiding or downplaying the difficult questions. So I'm building a robot platform... but so far I have just been assembling and upgrading a CNC machine shop to use for that purpose. >From a software perspective, I am designing and coding visual and spatial >modalities that will hopefully be reasonably congruent with the ones in our >brains and bodies. Dev Robotics people sometimes say things like: "... the kinds of categories and concepts a robot may develop through its interactions with the environment are likely to be quite different from our own." (from the paper you linked). But that seems like a poor attitude to me, and such differences should be minimized IMO to the extent possible if we want a "robot baby" to grow up capable of effectively absorbing knowledge from our vast cultural ideosphere (Internet etc), which is expressed in idiosyncratically human idioms. That knowledge base took a hundred billion human lifetimes to build (both world knowledge and more importantly useful ways to think) and if we expect an AGI to rediscover all of it on its own... well that seems rather ambitious to me. It will probably be at least another year before I have this sensory-robotic platform built and coded -- and I expect I will need a similar development effort devoted to "low level" motor systems, if for no other reason than the apparent link in humans between those motor systems and abstract thought processes involving action (procedures, planning, etc, and maybe even "events"). Most of my limited "thinking" and reading time is spent on two areas, which the platform is supposed to help me explore: 1) What do "concepts" need to do, and how do they arise from experience / training? Blending, categorizing, etc, etc -- we have a distressingly large number of cognitive processes involved with building and using concepts... What commonalities do they share? What clues have we found in the brain? How could the relatively short evolutionary path from non-generally-intelligent animals to us have created so many uniquely human mental abilities? And, related, which concept-related features are present in other animals? Stuff like that.... Call it a requirements specification for a conceptual modeling machine. 2) How do precepts lead to concepts? Especially, how does embodied experience lead to learning the basic concept inventory (image schemas and similar concepts)? A fair bit has been written about this but not very much that is specific and coherent. Mike, as you can see, I'm sympathetic to many of your basic opinions about what is important, and I wish that instead of attacking "AGIers" with annoying insults and tossing out neologisms-of-the-week, you would put together a few details about what you think. "Icons are fluid" doesn't say as much as you seem to think... Anyway, this went on way too long for anybody to actually read I'm sure, but I think it's nice when folks on this list write a little bit about what they are working on once in a while... Derek Zahn -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [agi] The many different types of embodiment Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2013 09:32:40 +0000 Wasn’t saying it’s new – just that it would be nice to have some comments on it and related disciplines – and for people to stop even considering “developmental AI” (vs robotics) as a possibility rather than a totally outdated impossible fantasy. From: Piaget Modeler Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2013 1:36 AM To: AGI Subject: RE: [agi] The many different types of embodiment What is new about developmental robotics (or developmental AI) for that matter? Nothing new there. To me it is the goal. ~PM ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > From: [email protected] > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: [agi] The many different types of embodiment > Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2013 23:37:52 +0000 > > Doesn't sound any clearer. > > How about following developmental robotics rather than evo devo universe? > That seems to be the field inspiring a lot of European research. > > http://www.psy.cmu.edu/~rakison/meedenconnsci06.pdf > http://rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2011/03/developmental-robotics-the-cute-baby-robot-who-will-grow-up-to-be-just-like-you.html > http://www.psy.cmu.edu/~rakison/meedenconnsci06.pdf > > I esp. liked the premise of the above paper: > > "we shall eliminate direct programming from consideration; it is still the > most effective method for solving a particular task quickly, but seems > unlikely ever to lead to > open-ended, general-purpose behaviour" > > Any comments on this and related fields? Epigenetic robotics et al? > AGI | Archives | Modify Your Subscription AGI | Archives | Modify Your Subscription AGI | Archives | Modify Your Subscription ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
