Ben has been saying that embodied experience is crucial for AGI,
and I've been reflexively noding my head in agreement. Now, that
the integration of virtual bodies with reasoning, knowledge bases,
and NLP processing is not that far off in the future -- a few years at
most -- I'm starting to wonder, "is embodied experience *really* that
important?" in other words -- "what else is there?", and reflexivly,
"is embodied experience really critical?" Its clearly important,
and we'll do it anyway, but I'll try to argue below how it might not
be critical.
Embodied experience will help develop notions of here, there,
time, place, action and reaction, juxtaposition, manipulation,
situational context, tool use. If motion is constrained and not
unlimited, then you have motion planning and sports. Lets look
at a few things which seem less tied to to experience of externalized
body: music, muscular awareness, "altered states" and emotions,
social interaction, engineering, mathematics.
What about music and music appreciation? Most modern
music is rhythmic, and the speed of rhythm is determined
by body motion ... rhythmic music tends to be danceable.
To dance to music, one must "be at one" with one's body
-- the natural mechanical frequency of limbs, the natural
strength and damping forces of the muscles. Many kinds of
music are fun to sing along to, and this requires vocal-cord
and breathing awareness. I suppose that giving an AGI
a human-accurate set of lungs and vocal-cords will help with
music appreceation -- for dancable and singable music.
How to grok Mozart or Brahms is less clear.
Both dancing and singing tends to lead to hyperventilation,
various endorphins and neurotransmitters flooding the body,
not to mention alcohol, tobacco, pot, whatever. I'm not sure
how AGI is supposed to feel runner's high, alcoholic hangovers,
or orgasm. There's no clear way of providing a compute
platform for these exerpiences. ... then we have ... anger,
hapiness, shame, humility, joy, mania, manipulativeness,
self-delusion, vanity, pride, desire, suggestability, hunger,
exhaustion, sleep, dreaming. What should be the framework
for these experiences?
If you want to learn about all of the various ways in which
humans interact, you can watch a lot of Hollywood movies,
or TV dramas, comedies. But the point of drama seems lost
if you don't understand how words can cut, deceive, applaud,
reassure, propagandize. One-on-one social interaction is
very much driven by emotional reactions to fleeting eye
contact, smiles, frowns; perceived social status and
situational status. On what computational platform do
we drape emotions?
Perhaps we can build an "emotion parser", that will "read
human emotions", in the same way that we build parsers
for other things. Such a machine may be very good at
discerning the emotional state of a human .. but will it really
"understand"? Or, by analogy, will it just be more like a
shallow linguistic parser -- a bunch of links and relationships,
without real insight into meaning? How can you experience
loss without experiencing tears?
I suppose that the above could potentially be solved by
giving the AGI a body that is ever-so-more humanlike,
starting from mechanical motion, and moving to the
interplay neurons and blood-born neurochemicals.
There seem to be two places where AGI progress is
not mediated by the need for a body: engineering, mathematics,
science. Although being embodied won't hurt, it seems that
the task of building an AGI scientist does not require embodiment.
These would seem to be areas where an AGI *could* learn
(should be able to learn) *only by reading*, without reference
to body sense and the meaning derived therefrom. So,
to countermand Ben's arguments:
-- I don't see what benefit embodiment brings to the creation
of an agi scientist/engineer, whereas reading is critical.
Mechanical awareness -- not so much -- AGI could have
"immediate" mechanical awareness of not just 3D, but also
4D, 5D, etc. spaces.
-- I see that simple embodiment is not anywhere near enough
to put human social contact into the reach of direct experience.
Embodiment will help AGI understand "chair" and "table";
it will not help it understand vindictiveness, slander.
More abstractly, emodiment will not help it understand
"president", "Russia" or "newspaperman" -- only reading
seems to open these gates.
--linas
-------------------------------------------
agi
Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now
RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/
Modify Your Subscription:
https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=108809214-a0d121
Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
