Firstly, I have no problem with the "embodied cognition" idea so far as it relates to human beings (or animals, for that matter). Yes, people think also with their bodies, store memories in the environment, point at things, and so on. This seems to me both true and unremarkable. So unremarkable as to hardly be worth the amount of thought that apparently goes into it. While it may be interesting to trace out all the ways in which it happens, I see no philosophical importance in the details.
Where it goes wrong is the application to AGI that says that because people do this, it is an essential part of how an intellgence of any sort must operate, and therefore a man-made intelligent machine must be given a body. The argument mistakes a superficial fact about observed intelligences for a fact about the mechanism whereby an intelligence of any sort must operate. There is a large and expanding body of work on making ever more elaborate robot puppets like the Nao, explicitly following a research programme of developing "embodied cognition".
I cannot see these projects as being of any interest. I would be a lot more interested in seeing someone build a human-sized robot that can run unsupported on two legs (Boston Dynamics' ATLAS is getting there), especially if it can run faster than a man while carrying a full military pack and isn't tethered to a power cable (not yet done). However, nothing like that is a prerequisite to AGI. I do hold a personal opinion, which I'm not going to argue for here, that if someone developed a simple method of solving the control problems of an all-terrain running robot, they might get from that some insight into how to get farther, such as an all-terrain running robot that can hunt down humans trying to avoid it. Of course, the Unfriendly directions that might lead are obvious, as are the military motivations for building such machines, or inviting people to come up with designs. Of course, these powers will only be used for Good.
Since the embodied approach has been around in strength since the 1980s, and can be found in Turing in 1950, I think it fair to say that if it worked beyond the toy projects that AGI attempts always produce, we would have seen it by now.
The deaf communicate without sound, the blind without sight, and the limbless without pointing hands. On the internet people communicate without any of these. It doesn't seem to hold anyone up, except in the mere matter of speed in the case of Stephen Hawking communicating by twitching cheek muscles.
Ah, no, the magic ingredient must be society! Cognition always takes place within society. Feral children are developmentally disabled for want of society. The evidence is clear: we must develop societies of AIs before they can be intelligent.
No, it's language they must have! AGIs cognition must be based on a language. So if we design the perfect language, AGI will be a snap.
No, it's upbringing they must have! So we'll design a robot to be initially like a newborn baby and teach it through experience!
No, it's....
No. The general form of all these arguments is broken.
The "magic ingredient" may be a bridging of intuitions: an embodied AI which you can more naturally interact with offers more intuitive metrics for progress; milestones which can be used to attract funding since they make more sense intuitively.
Obviously you can build an AGI using only lego stones. And you can build an AGI "purely" as software (i.e. with variable hardware substrates). The steelman for pursuing embodied cognition would not be "embodiment is strictly necessary to build AGIs" (boring!), but that "given huma...
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