Josh,
Since the 90s there has been a strand in AI research that claims that
robotics is necessary to the enterprise, based on the notion that
having a body is necessary to intelligence. Symbols, it is said, must
be grounded in physical experience to have meaning. Without such
grounding AI practitioners are deceiving themselves by calling their
Lisp atoms things like MOTHER-IN-LAW when they really mean no more
than G2250.
Pei: I think these people correctly recognized a problem in traditional AI,
though they attributed it to a wrong cause.. Every implemented system
already has a "body" --- the hardware, and
as long as the system has input and output, it has experience that
comes from its body. Of course, since the body is not human body, the
experience is not human experience. However, as far as this discussion
is concerned, it doesn't matter, since this kind of experience is
genuine experience that can be used to ground meaning of concepts.
Er, there's one thing so screamingly obvious that you guys don't seem to be
taking it into account here. All these machines you are talking about are
basically inert lumps of metal and don't exist without human beings to
switch them on, feed them & interpret them. Humans are still, pace Rodney B,
"in the loop." Try taking humans out of the loop and then see what these
standalone computers do and don't understand - or what they do, period.
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