I think probably "AGI-curious" person has intuitions about this subject. Here are mine: Some people, especially those espousing a modular software-engineering type of approach seem to think that a perceptual system basically should spit out a token for "chair" when it sees a chair, and then a reasoning system can take over to reason about chairs and what you might do with them -- and further it is thought that the "reasoning about chairs" part is really the essence of intelligence, whereas chair detection is just discardable pre-processing. My personal intuition says that by the time you have taken experience and boiled it down to a token labeled "chair" you have discarded almost everything important about the experience and all that is left is something that can be used by our logical inference systems. And although that ability to do logical inference (probabilistic or pure) is a super-cool thing that humans can do, it is a fairly minor part of our intelligence. Often I see AGI types referring to physical embodiment as a costly sideshow or as something that would be nice if a team of roboticists were available. But really, a simple robot is trivial to build, and even a camera on a pan/tilt base pointed at an interesting physical location is way easier to build than a detailed simulation world. The next objection is that "image processing" is too expensive and difficult. I guess my only thought about that it doesn't inspire confidence in an approach if the very first layer of neural processing is too hard. I suspect the real issue is that even if you do the "image processing", then what? What do you do with the output? Ignoring those issues -- inventing a way of representing and manipulating "knowledge", and assuming that sensory processes can create those data structures if built properly -- can work IF it turns out that brains are just really really bad at being "intelligent". That is, if the extreme tip of the evolutionary iceberg (some thousands of generations of lightly-populated species) finally stumbled on the fluid symbol-manipulating abilities that define intelligence, and the rest of the historical structures are only mildly more important than organs that pump blood -- if that's true, thinking about all this low-level grunk is a waste of time. I actually hope that it's true, but I doubt it. To the first people who had the ability to code our magical symbol processing abilities on a machine, it must have seemed like an exciting theory.
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