You make a very important point that I would like to emphasize: incommensurate bodies very likely will lead to misunderstanding. It’s not just a matter of shared or disjunct body isomorphism. It’s also a matter of embodied interaction in a real world.
Let’s take the very fundamental function of pointing. Every human language is rife with words called deictics that anchor the flow of utterance to specific pieces of the immediate environment. English examples are words like “this”, “that”, “near”, “far”, “soon”, “late”, the positional prepositions, pronominals like “me” and “you”—the meaning of these terms is grounded dynamically by the speakers and hearers in the time and place of utterance, the placement and salience of surrounding objects and structures, and the particular speaker and hearers and overhearers of the utterance. Human pointing—with the fingers, hands, eyes, chin, head tilt, elbow, whatever—has been shown to perform much the same functions as deictic speech in utterance. (See the work of Sotaro Kita if you’re interested in the data). A robot with no mechanism for pointing and no sensory apparatus for detecting the pointing gestures of human agents in its environment will misunderstand a great deal and will not be able to communicate fluently.
Then there are the cultural conventions that regulate pointing words and gestures alike. For example, spatial meanings tend to be either speaker-relative or landmark-relative or absolute (that is, embedded in a spatial frame of cardinal directions) in a given culture, and whichever of these options the culture chooses is used in both physical pointing and linguistic pointing through deictics. A robot with no cultural reference won’t be able to disambigurate “there” (relative to me here now) versus “there” (relative to the river/mountain/rising sun), even if physical pointing is integrated into the attempt to figure out what “there” is. And the problem may not be detected due to the illustion of double transparency.
This gets even more complicated when the world of discourse shifts from the immediate environment to other places, other times, or abstract ideas. People don’t stop inhabiting the real world when they talk about abstract ideas. And what you see in conversation videos is people mapping the world of discourse metaphorically to physical locations or objects in their immediate environment. The space behind me becomes yesterday’s events and the space beyond my reach in front of me becomes tomorrow’s plan. Or I alway point to the left when I’m talking about George and to the right when I’m talking about Fred.
This is all very much an empirical question, as you say. I guess my point is that the data has been accumulating for several decades now that embodiment matters a great deal. Where and how it matters is just beginning to be sorted out.
A robot with no mechanism for pointing and no sensory apparatus for detecting the pointing gestures of human agents in its environment will misunderstand a great deal and will not be able to communicate fluently.
If I am talking to you on the telephone, I have no mechanism for pointing and no sensory apparatus for detecting your pointing gestures, yet we can communicate just fine.
The whole embodied cognition thing is a massive, elementary mistake as bad as all the ones that Eliezer has analysed in the Sequences. It’s an instant fail.
The whole embodied cognition thing is a massive, elementary mistake as bad as all the ones that Eliezer has analysed in the Sequences. It’s an instant fail.
Can you expand on this just a bit? I am leaning, slowly, in the same direction, and I’d like a bit of a sanity check on this claim.
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.
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.
This is where you lose me. Isn’t that an equally effective argument against AGI in general?
Isn’t that an equally effective argument against AGI in general?
“AGI in general” is a thing of unlimited broadness, about which lack of success so far implies nothing more than lack of success so far. Cf. flying machines, which weren’t made until they were. Embodied cognition, on the other hand, is a definite thing, a specific approach that is at least 30 years old, and I don’t think it’s even made a contribution to narrow AI yet. It is only mentioned in Russell and Norvig in their concluding section on the philosophy of Strong AI, not in any of the practical chapters.
I took RichardKennaway’s post to mean something like the following:
“Birds fly by flapping their wings, but that’s not the only way to fly; we have built airplanes, dirigibles and rockets that fly differently. Humans acquire intelligence (and language) by interacting with their physical environment using a specific set of sensors and effectors, but that’s not the only way to acquire intelligence. Tomorrow, we may build an AI that does so differently.”
But since that idea has been around in strength since the 1980s, and can be found in Turing in 1950, apparently it’s fair to say that if it worked beyond the toy projects that AGI attempts always produce, we would have seen it by now.
I think that we have seen it by now, we just don’t call it “AI”. Even in Turing’s day, we had radar systems that could automatically lock on to enemy planes and shoot them down. Today, we have search engines that can provide answers (with a significant degree of success) to textual or verbal queries; mapping software that can plot the best path through a network of roadways; chess programs that can consistently defeat humans; cars that drive themselves; planes that fly themselves; plus a host of other things like that. Sure, none of these projects are Strong AI, but neither are they toys.
This depends on the definition of ‘toy projects’ that you use. For the sort of broad definition you are using, where ‘toy projects’ refers literally to toys, Richard Kennaway’s original claim that the embodied approach had only produced toys is factually incorrect. For the definition of ‘toy projects’ that both Richard Kennaway and Document are using, in which ‘toy projects’ is more closely related to ‘toy models’- i.e.attempts at a simplified version of Strong AI- this is an argument against AGI in general.
I see what you mean, but I’m having trouble understanding what “a simplified version of Strong AI” would look like.
For example, can we consider a natural language processing system that’s connected to a modern search engine to be “a simplified version of Strong AI” ? Such a system is obviously not generally intelligent, but it does perform several important functions—such as natural language processing—that would pretty much be a requirement for any AGI. However, the implementation of such a system is most likely not generalizable to an AGI (if it were, we’d have AGI by now). So, can we consider it to be a “toy project”, or not ?
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 humans with a goal of building an AGI, going the embodiment route may be a viable approach”.
I well remember that early morning in the CS lab, the better part of a decade ago, when I stumbled—still half asleep—into a sideroom to turn on the lights, only to stare into the eye of Eccerobot (in an earlier incarnation), which was visiting our lab. Shudder.
I used to joke that my goal in life would be to build the successor creature, and to be judged by it (humankind and me both). To be judged and to be found unworthy in its (in this case single) eye, and to be smitten. After all, what better emotional proof to have created something of worth is there than your creation judging you to be unworthy? Take my atoms, Adambot!
I don’t know, but I doubt that the communication medium makes much difference beyond the individual skills of the people using it. People can use multiple modalities to communicate, and in a situation where some are missing, one varies one’s use of the others to accomplish the goal.
In adversarial negotiations one might even find it an advantage not to be seen, to avoid accidentally revealing things one wishes to keep secret. Of course, that applies to both parties, and it will come down to a matter of who is more skilled at using the means available.
Sure, I agree that we make use of all kinds of contextual cues to interpret speech, and a system lacking awareness of that context will have trouble interpreting speech.For example, if I say “Do you like that?” to Sam, when Sam can’t see the thing I’m gesturing to indicate or doesn’t share the cultural context that lets them interpret that gesture, Sam won’t be able to interpret or engage with me successfully. Absolutely agreed. And this applies to all kinds of things, including (as you say) but hardly limited to pointing.
And, sure, the system may not even be aware of that trouble… illusions of transparency abound. Sam might go along secure in the belief that they know what I’m asking about and be completely wrong. Absolutely agreed.
And sure, I agree that we rely heavily on physical metaphors when discussing abstract ideas, and that a system incapable of processing my metaphors will have difficulty engaging with me successfully. Absolutely agreed.
All of that said, what I have trouble with is your apparent insistence that only a humanoid system is capable of perceiving or interpreting human contextual cues, metaphors, etc. That doesn’t seem likely to me at all, any more than it seems likely that a blind person (or one on the other end of a text-only link) is incapable of understanding human speech.
Let’s take the very fundamental function of pointing. Every human language is rife with words called deictics that anchor the flow of utterance to specific pieces of the immediate environment. English examples are words like “this”, “that”, “near”, “far”, “soon”, “late”, the positional prepositions, pronominals like “me” and “you”—the meaning of these terms is grounded dynamically by the speakers and hearers in the time and place of utterance, the placement and salience of surrounding objects and structures, and the particular speaker and hearers and overhearers of the utterance. Human pointing—with the fingers, hands, eyes, chin, head tilt, elbow, whatever—has been shown to perform much the same functions as deictic speech in utterance. (See the work of Sotaro Kita if you’re interested in the data). A robot with no mechanism for pointing and no sensory apparatus for detecting the pointing gestures of human agents in its environment will misunderstand a great deal and will not be able to communicate fluently.
Are you really claiming that ability to understand the very concept of indexicality, and concepts like “soon”, “late”, “far”, etc., relies on humanlike fingers? That seems like an extraordinary claim, to put it lightly.
Also:
A robot with no mechanism for pointing and no sensory apparatus for detecting the pointing gestures of human agents in its environment will misunderstand a great deal and will not be able to communicate fluently.
“Detecting pointing gestures” would be the function of a perception algorithm, not a sensory apparatus (unless what you mean is “a robot with no ability to perceive positions/orientations/etc. of objects in its environment”, which… wouldn’t be very useful). So it’s a matter of what we do with sense data, not what sorts of body we have; that is, software, not hardware.
More generally, a lot of what you’re saying (and — this is my very tentative impression — a lot of the ideas of embodied cognition in general) seems to be based on an idea that we might create some general-intelligent AI or robot, but have it start at some “undeveloped” state and then proceed to “learn” or “evolve”, gathering concepts about the world, growing in understanding, until it achieves some desired level of intellectual development. The concern then arises that without the kind of embodiment that we humans enjoy, this AI will not develop the concepts necessary for it to understand us and vice versa.
Ok. But is anyone working in AI these days actually suggesting that this is how we should go about doing things? Is everyone working in AI these days suggesting that? Isn’t this entire line of reasoning inapplicable to whole broad swaths of possible approaches to AI design?
P.S. What does “there, relative to the river” mean?
Are you really claiming that ability to understand the very concept of indexicality, and concepts like “soon”, “late”, “far”, etc., relies on humanlike fingers? That seems like an extraordinary claim, to put it lightly.
Yeah, I am advancing the hypothesis that, in humans, the comprehension of indexicality relies on embodied pointing at its core—though not just with fingers, which are not universally used for pointing in all human cultures. Sotaro Kita has the most data on this subject for language, but the embodied basis of mathematics is discussed in Where Mathematics Comes From, by by Geroge Lakoff and Rafael Nunez . Whether all possible minds must rely on such a mechanism, I couldn’t possibly guess. But I am persuaded humans do (a lot of) it with their bodies.
What does “there, relative to the river” mean?
In most European cultures, we use speaker-relative deictics. If I point to the southeast while facing south and say “there”, I mean “generally to my front and left”. But if I turn around and face north, I will point to the northwest and say “there” to mean the same thing, ie, “generally to my front and left.” The fact that the physical direction of my pointing gesture is different is irrelevant in English; it’s my body position that’s used as a landmark for finding the target of “there”. (Unless I’m pointing at something in particular here and now, of course; in which case the target of the pointing action becomes its own landmark.)
In a number of Native American languages, the pointing is always to a cardinal direction. If the orientation of my body changes when I say “there”, I might point over my shoulder rather than to my front and left. The landmark for finding the target of “there” is a direction relative to the trajetory of the sun.
But many cultures use a dominant feature of the landscape, like the Amazon or the Missippi or the Nile rivers, or a major mountain range like the Rockies, or a sacred city like Mecca, as the orientation landmark, and in some cultures this gets encoded in the deictics of the language and the conventions for pointing. “Up” might not mean up vertically, but rather “upriver”, while “down” would be “downriver”. In a steep river valley in New Guinea, “down” could mean “toward the river” and “up” could mean “away from the river”. And “here” could mean “at the river” while “there” could mean “not at the river”.
The cultural variability and place-specificity of language was not widely known to Western linguists until about ten years ago. For a long time, it was assumed that person-relative orientation was a biological constraint on meaning. This turns out to be not quite accurate. So I guess I should be more nuanced in the way I present the notion of embodied cognition. How’s this: “Embodied action in the world with a cultural twist on top” is the grounding point at the bottom of the symbol expansion for human meanings, linguistic and otherwise.
If the orientation of my body changes when I say “there”, I might point over my shoulder rather than to my front and left.
I was able to follow this explanation (as well as the rest of your post) without seeing your physical body in any way. In addition, I suspect that, while you were typing your paragraph, you weren’t physically pointing at things. The fact that we can do this looks to me like evidence against your main thesis.
I was able to follow this explanation (as well as the rest of your post) without seeing your physical body in any way. … The fact that we can do this looks to me like evidence against your main thesis.
Ah, but you’re assuming that this particular interaction stands on its own. I’ll bet you were able to visualize the described gestures just fine by invoking memories of past interactions with bodies in the world.
Two points. First, I don’t contest the existence of verbal labels that merely refer—or even just register as being invoked without refering at all. As long as some labels are directly grounded to body/world, or refer to other labels that do get grounded in the body/world historically, we generally get by in routine situations. And all cultures have error detection and repair norms for conversation so that we can usually recover without social disaster.
However, the fact that verbal labels can be used without grounding them in the body/world is a problem. It is frequently the case that speakers and hearers alike don’t bother to connect words to reality, and this is a major source of misunderstanding, error, and nonsense. In our own case here and now, we are actually failing to understand each other fully because I can’t show you actual videotapes of what I’m talking about. You are rightly skeptical because words alone aren’t good enough evidence. And that is itself evidence.
Second, humans have a developmental trajectory and history, and memories of that history. We’re a time-binding animal in Korzybski’s terminology. I would suggest that an enculturated adult native speaker of a language will have what amount to “muscle memory” tics that can be invoked as needed to create referents. Mere memory of a motion or a perception is probably sufficient.
“Oh, look, it’s an invisible gesture!” is not at all convincing, I realize, so let me summarize several lines of evidence for it.
Developmentally, there’s quite a lot of research on language acquisition in infants and young children that suggests shared attention management—through indexical pointing, and shared gaze, and physical coercion of the body, and noises that trigger attention shift—is a critical building block for constructing “aboutness” in human language. We also start out with some shared, built-in cries and facial expressions linked to emotional states. At this level of development, communication largely fails unless there is a lot of embodied scaffolding for the interaction, much of it provided by the caregiver but a large part of it provided by the physical context of the interaction. There is also some evidence from the gestural communication of apes that attests to the importance of embodied attention management in communication.
Also, co-speech gesture turns out to be a human universal. Congenitally blind children do it, having never seen gesture by anyone else. Congenitally deaf children who spend time in groups together will invent entire gestural languages complete with formal syntax, as recently happened in Nicaragua. And adults speaking on the telephone will gesture even knowing they cannot be seen. Granted, people gesture in private at a significantly lower rate than they do face-to-face, but the fact that they do it at all is a bit of a puzzle, since the gestures can’t be serving a communicative function in these contexts. Does the gesturing help the speakers actually think, or at least make meaning more clear to themselves? Susan Goldin-Meadow and her colleagues think so.
We also know from video conversation data that adults spontaneously invent new gestures all the time in conversation, then reuse them. Interestingly, though, each reuse becomes more attentuated, simplified, and stylized with repetition. Similar effects are seen in the development of sign languages and in written scripts.
But just how embodied can a label be when gesture (and other embodied experience) is just a memory, and is so internalized that is is externally invisible? This has actually been tested experimentally. The Stroop effect has been known for decades, for example: when the word “red” is presented in blue text, it is read or acted on more slowly than when the word “red” is presented in red text—or in socially neutral black text. That’s on the embodied perception side of things. But more recent psychophysical experiments have demonstrated a similar psychomotor Stroop-like effect when spatial and motion stimulus sentences are semantically congruent with the direction of the required response action. This effect holds even for metaphorical words like “give”, which tests as motor-congruent with motion away from oneself, and “take”, which tests as motor-congruent with motion toward oneself.
I understand how counterintuitive this stuff can be when you first encounter it—especially to intelligent folks who work with codes or words or models a great deal. I expect the two of us will never reach a consensus on this without looking at a lot of original data—and who has the time to analyze all the data that exists on all the interesting problems in the world? I’d be pleased if you could just note for future reference that a body of empirical evidence exists for the claim. That’s all.
In our own case here and now, we are actually failing to understand each other fully because I can’t show you actual videotapes of what I’m talking about.
What do you mean by “fully” ? I believe I understand you well enough for all practical purposes. I don’t agree with you, but agreement and understanding are two different things.
First, I don’t contest the existence of verbal labels that merely refer—or even just register as being invoked without refering at all.
I’m not sure what you mean by “merely refer”, but keep in mind that we humans are able to communicate concepts which have no physical analogues that would be immediately accessible to our senses. For example, we can talk about things like “O(N)”, or “ribosome”, or “a^n +b^n = c^n”. We can also talk about entirely imaginary worlds, such as f.ex. the world where Mario, the turtle-crushing plumber, lives. And we can do this without having any “physical context” for the interaction, too.
All that is beside the point, however. In the rest of your post, you bring up a lot of evidence in support of your model of human development. That’s great, but your original claim was that any type of intelligence at all will require a physical body in order to develop; and nothing you’ve said so far is relevant to this claim. True, human intelligence is the only kind we know of so far, but then, at one point birds and insects were the only self-propelled flyers in existence—and that’s not the case anymore.
Furthermore, your also claimed that no simulation, no matter how realistic, will serve to replace the physical world for the purposes of human development, and I’m still not convinced that this is true, either. As I’d said before, we humans do not have perfect senses; if physical coordinates of real objects were snapped to a 0.01mm grid, no human child would ever notice. And in fact, there are plenty of humans who grow up and develop language just fine without the ability to see colors, or to move some of their limbs in order to point at things.
Just to drive the point home: even if I granted all of your arguments regarding humans, you would still need to demonstrate that human intelligence is the only possible kind of intelligence; that growing up in a human body is the only possible way to develop human intelligence; and that no simulation could in principle suffice, and the body must be physical. These are all very strong claims, and so far you have provided no evidence for any of them.
Let me refer you to Computation and Human Experience, by Philip E. Agre, and to Understanding Computers and Cognition, by Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores.
Yeah, I am advancing the hypothesis that, in humans, the comprehension of indexicality relies on embodied pointing at its core [...] Whether all possible minds must rely on such a mechanism, I couldn’t possibly guess. But I am persuaded humans do (a lot of) it with their bodies.
But wait; whether all possible minds must rely on such a mechanism is the entire question at hand! Humans implement this feature in some particular way? Fine; but this thread started by discussing what AIs and robots must do to implement the same feature. If implementation-specific details in humans don’t tell us anything interesting about implementation constraints in other minds, especially artificial minds which we are in theory free to place anywhere in mind design space, then the entire topic is almost completely irrelevant to an AI discussion (except possible as an example of “well, here is one way you could do it”).
In most European cultures, we use speaker-relative deictics. If I point to the southeast while facing south and say “there”, I mean “generally to my front and left”. But if I turn around and face north, I will point to the northwest and say “there” to mean the same thing, ie, “generally to my front and left.”
Er, what? I thought I was a member of a European culture, but I don’t think this is how I use the word “there”. If I point to some direction while facing somewhere, and say “there”, I mean… “in the direction I am pointing”.
The only situation when I’d use “there” in the way you describe is if I were describing some scenario involving myself located somewhere other than my current location, such that absolute directions in the story/scenario would not be the same as absolute directions in my current location.
In a steep river valley in New Guinea, “down” could mean “toward the river” and “up” could mean “away from the river”. And “here” could mean “at the river” while “there” could mean “not at the river”.
If this is accurate, then why on earth would we map this word in this language to the English “there”? It clearly does not remotely resemble how we use the word “there”, so this seems to be a case of poor translation rather than an example of cultural differences.
In a number of Native American languages, the pointing is always to a cardinal direction. [...] The cultural variability and place-specificity of language was not widely known to Western linguists until about ten years ago. For a long time, it was assumed that person-relative orientation was a biological constraint on meaning.
Yeah, actually, this research I was aware of. As I recall, the Native Americans in question had some difficulty understanding the Westerners’ concepts of speaker-relative indexicals. But note: if we can have such different concepts of indexicality, despite sharing the same pointing digits and whatnot… it seems premature, at best, to suggest that said hardware plays such a key role in our concept formation, much less in the possibility of having such concepts at all.
How’s this: “Embodied action in the world with a cultural twist on top” is the grounding point at the bottom of the symbol expansion for human meanings, linguistic and otherwise.
Ultimately, the interesting aspect of this entire discussion (imo, of course) is what these human-specific implementation details can tell us about other parts of mind design space. I remain skeptical that the answer is anything other than “not much”. (Incidentally, if you know of papers/books that address this aspect specifically, I would be interested.)
You make a very important point that I would like to emphasize: incommensurate bodies very likely will lead to misunderstanding. It’s not just a matter of shared or disjunct body isomorphism. It’s also a matter of embodied interaction in a real world.
Let’s take the very fundamental function of pointing. Every human language is rife with words called deictics that anchor the flow of utterance to specific pieces of the immediate environment. English examples are words like “this”, “that”, “near”, “far”, “soon”, “late”, the positional prepositions, pronominals like “me” and “you”—the meaning of these terms is grounded dynamically by the speakers and hearers in the time and place of utterance, the placement and salience of surrounding objects and structures, and the particular speaker and hearers and overhearers of the utterance. Human pointing—with the fingers, hands, eyes, chin, head tilt, elbow, whatever—has been shown to perform much the same functions as deictic speech in utterance. (See the work of Sotaro Kita if you’re interested in the data). A robot with no mechanism for pointing and no sensory apparatus for detecting the pointing gestures of human agents in its environment will misunderstand a great deal and will not be able to communicate fluently.
Then there are the cultural conventions that regulate pointing words and gestures alike. For example, spatial meanings tend to be either speaker-relative or landmark-relative or absolute (that is, embedded in a spatial frame of cardinal directions) in a given culture, and whichever of these options the culture chooses is used in both physical pointing and linguistic pointing through deictics. A robot with no cultural reference won’t be able to disambigurate “there” (relative to me here now) versus “there” (relative to the river/mountain/rising sun), even if physical pointing is integrated into the attempt to figure out what “there” is. And the problem may not be detected due to the illustion of double transparency.
This gets even more complicated when the world of discourse shifts from the immediate environment to other places, other times, or abstract ideas. People don’t stop inhabiting the real world when they talk about abstract ideas. And what you see in conversation videos is people mapping the world of discourse metaphorically to physical locations or objects in their immediate environment. The space behind me becomes yesterday’s events and the space beyond my reach in front of me becomes tomorrow’s plan. Or I alway point to the left when I’m talking about George and to the right when I’m talking about Fred.
This is all very much an empirical question, as you say. I guess my point is that the data has been accumulating for several decades now that embodiment matters a great deal. Where and how it matters is just beginning to be sorted out.
If I am talking to you on the telephone, I have no mechanism for pointing and no sensory apparatus for detecting your pointing gestures, yet we can communicate just fine.
The whole embodied cognition thing is a massive, elementary mistake as bad as all the ones that Eliezer has analysed in the Sequences. It’s an instant fail.
Can you expand on this just a bit? I am leaning, slowly, in the same direction, and I’d like a bit of a sanity check on this claim.
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.
This is where you lose me. Isn’t that an equally effective argument against AGI in general?
“AGI in general” is a thing of unlimited broadness, about which lack of success so far implies nothing more than lack of success so far. Cf. flying machines, which weren’t made until they were. Embodied cognition, on the other hand, is a definite thing, a specific approach that is at least 30 years old, and I don’t think it’s even made a contribution to narrow AI yet. It is only mentioned in Russell and Norvig in their concluding section on the philosophy of Strong AI, not in any of the practical chapters.
I took RichardKennaway’s post to mean something like the following:
“Birds fly by flapping their wings, but that’s not the only way to fly; we have built airplanes, dirigibles and rockets that fly differently. Humans acquire intelligence (and language) by interacting with their physical environment using a specific set of sensors and effectors, but that’s not the only way to acquire intelligence. Tomorrow, we may build an AI that does so differently.”
But since that idea has been around in strength since the 1980s, and can be found in Turing in 1950, apparently it’s fair to say that if it worked beyond the toy projects that AGI attempts always produce, we would have seen it by now.
I think that we have seen it by now, we just don’t call it “AI”. Even in Turing’s day, we had radar systems that could automatically lock on to enemy planes and shoot them down. Today, we have search engines that can provide answers (with a significant degree of success) to textual or verbal queries; mapping software that can plot the best path through a network of roadways; chess programs that can consistently defeat humans; cars that drive themselves; planes that fly themselves; plus a host of other things like that. Sure, none of these projects are Strong AI, but neither are they toys.
This depends on the definition of ‘toy projects’ that you use. For the sort of broad definition you are using, where ‘toy projects’ refers literally to toys, Richard Kennaway’s original claim that the embodied approach had only produced toys is factually incorrect. For the definition of ‘toy projects’ that both Richard Kennaway and Document are using, in which ‘toy projects’ is more closely related to ‘toy models’- i.e.attempts at a simplified version of Strong AI- this is an argument against AGI in general.
I see what you mean, but I’m having trouble understanding what “a simplified version of Strong AI” would look like.
For example, can we consider a natural language processing system that’s connected to a modern search engine to be “a simplified version of Strong AI” ? Such a system is obviously not generally intelligent, but it does perform several important functions—such as natural language processing—that would pretty much be a requirement for any AGI. However, the implementation of such a system is most likely not generalizable to an AGI (if it were, we’d have AGI by now). So, can we consider it to be a “toy project”, or not ?
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 humans with a goal of building an AGI, going the embodiment route may be a viable approach”.
I well remember that early morning in the CS lab, the better part of a decade ago, when I stumbled—still half asleep—into a sideroom to turn on the lights, only to stare into the eye of Eccerobot (in an earlier incarnation), which was visiting our lab. Shudder.
I used to joke that my goal in life would be to build the successor creature, and to be judged by it (humankind and me both). To be judged and to be found unworthy in its (in this case single) eye, and to be smitten. After all, what better emotional proof to have created something of worth is there than your creation judging you to be unworthy? Take my atoms, Adambot!
Are misunderstanding more common over the telephone for things like negotiation?
I don’t know, but I doubt that the communication medium makes much difference beyond the individual skills of the people using it. People can use multiple modalities to communicate, and in a situation where some are missing, one varies one’s use of the others to accomplish the goal.
In adversarial negotiations one might even find it an advantage not to be seen, to avoid accidentally revealing things one wishes to keep secret. Of course, that applies to both parties, and it will come down to a matter of who is more skilled at using the means available.
People even manage to communicate in writing!
Sure, I agree that we make use of all kinds of contextual cues to interpret speech, and a system lacking awareness of that context will have trouble interpreting speech.For example, if I say “Do you like that?” to Sam, when Sam can’t see the thing I’m gesturing to indicate or doesn’t share the cultural context that lets them interpret that gesture, Sam won’t be able to interpret or engage with me successfully. Absolutely agreed. And this applies to all kinds of things, including (as you say) but hardly limited to pointing.
And, sure, the system may not even be aware of that trouble… illusions of transparency abound. Sam might go along secure in the belief that they know what I’m asking about and be completely wrong. Absolutely agreed.
And sure, I agree that we rely heavily on physical metaphors when discussing abstract ideas, and that a system incapable of processing my metaphors will have difficulty engaging with me successfully. Absolutely agreed.
All of that said, what I have trouble with is your apparent insistence that only a humanoid system is capable of perceiving or interpreting human contextual cues, metaphors, etc. That doesn’t seem likely to me at all, any more than it seems likely that a blind person (or one on the other end of a text-only link) is incapable of understanding human speech.
Are you really claiming that ability to understand the very concept of indexicality, and concepts like “soon”, “late”, “far”, etc., relies on humanlike fingers? That seems like an extraordinary claim, to put it lightly.
Also:
“Detecting pointing gestures” would be the function of a perception algorithm, not a sensory apparatus (unless what you mean is “a robot with no ability to perceive positions/orientations/etc. of objects in its environment”, which… wouldn’t be very useful). So it’s a matter of what we do with sense data, not what sorts of body we have; that is, software, not hardware.
More generally, a lot of what you’re saying (and — this is my very tentative impression — a lot of the ideas of embodied cognition in general) seems to be based on an idea that we might create some general-intelligent AI or robot, but have it start at some “undeveloped” state and then proceed to “learn” or “evolve”, gathering concepts about the world, growing in understanding, until it achieves some desired level of intellectual development. The concern then arises that without the kind of embodiment that we humans enjoy, this AI will not develop the concepts necessary for it to understand us and vice versa.
Ok. But is anyone working in AI these days actually suggesting that this is how we should go about doing things? Is everyone working in AI these days suggesting that? Isn’t this entire line of reasoning inapplicable to whole broad swaths of possible approaches to AI design?
P.S. What does “there, relative to the river” mean?
Yeah, I am advancing the hypothesis that, in humans, the comprehension of indexicality relies on embodied pointing at its core—though not just with fingers, which are not universally used for pointing in all human cultures. Sotaro Kita has the most data on this subject for language, but the embodied basis of mathematics is discussed in Where Mathematics Comes From, by by Geroge Lakoff and Rafael Nunez . Whether all possible minds must rely on such a mechanism, I couldn’t possibly guess. But I am persuaded humans do (a lot of) it with their bodies.
In most European cultures, we use speaker-relative deictics. If I point to the southeast while facing south and say “there”, I mean “generally to my front and left”. But if I turn around and face north, I will point to the northwest and say “there” to mean the same thing, ie, “generally to my front and left.” The fact that the physical direction of my pointing gesture is different is irrelevant in English; it’s my body position that’s used as a landmark for finding the target of “there”. (Unless I’m pointing at something in particular here and now, of course; in which case the target of the pointing action becomes its own landmark.)
In a number of Native American languages, the pointing is always to a cardinal direction. If the orientation of my body changes when I say “there”, I might point over my shoulder rather than to my front and left. The landmark for finding the target of “there” is a direction relative to the trajetory of the sun.
But many cultures use a dominant feature of the landscape, like the Amazon or the Missippi or the Nile rivers, or a major mountain range like the Rockies, or a sacred city like Mecca, as the orientation landmark, and in some cultures this gets encoded in the deictics of the language and the conventions for pointing. “Up” might not mean up vertically, but rather “upriver”, while “down” would be “downriver”. In a steep river valley in New Guinea, “down” could mean “toward the river” and “up” could mean “away from the river”. And “here” could mean “at the river” while “there” could mean “not at the river”.
The cultural variability and place-specificity of language was not widely known to Western linguists until about ten years ago. For a long time, it was assumed that person-relative orientation was a biological constraint on meaning. This turns out to be not quite accurate. So I guess I should be more nuanced in the way I present the notion of embodied cognition. How’s this: “Embodied action in the world with a cultural twist on top” is the grounding point at the bottom of the symbol expansion for human meanings, linguistic and otherwise.
I was able to follow this explanation (as well as the rest of your post) without seeing your physical body in any way. In addition, I suspect that, while you were typing your paragraph, you weren’t physically pointing at things. The fact that we can do this looks to me like evidence against your main thesis.
Ah, but you’re assuming that this particular interaction stands on its own. I’ll bet you were able to visualize the described gestures just fine by invoking memories of past interactions with bodies in the world.
Two points. First, I don’t contest the existence of verbal labels that merely refer—or even just register as being invoked without refering at all. As long as some labels are directly grounded to body/world, or refer to other labels that do get grounded in the body/world historically, we generally get by in routine situations. And all cultures have error detection and repair norms for conversation so that we can usually recover without social disaster.
However, the fact that verbal labels can be used without grounding them in the body/world is a problem. It is frequently the case that speakers and hearers alike don’t bother to connect words to reality, and this is a major source of misunderstanding, error, and nonsense. In our own case here and now, we are actually failing to understand each other fully because I can’t show you actual videotapes of what I’m talking about. You are rightly skeptical because words alone aren’t good enough evidence. And that is itself evidence.
Second, humans have a developmental trajectory and history, and memories of that history. We’re a time-binding animal in Korzybski’s terminology. I would suggest that an enculturated adult native speaker of a language will have what amount to “muscle memory” tics that can be invoked as needed to create referents. Mere memory of a motion or a perception is probably sufficient.
“Oh, look, it’s an invisible gesture!” is not at all convincing, I realize, so let me summarize several lines of evidence for it.
Developmentally, there’s quite a lot of research on language acquisition in infants and young children that suggests shared attention management—through indexical pointing, and shared gaze, and physical coercion of the body, and noises that trigger attention shift—is a critical building block for constructing “aboutness” in human language. We also start out with some shared, built-in cries and facial expressions linked to emotional states. At this level of development, communication largely fails unless there is a lot of embodied scaffolding for the interaction, much of it provided by the caregiver but a large part of it provided by the physical context of the interaction. There is also some evidence from the gestural communication of apes that attests to the importance of embodied attention management in communication.
Also, co-speech gesture turns out to be a human universal. Congenitally blind children do it, having never seen gesture by anyone else. Congenitally deaf children who spend time in groups together will invent entire gestural languages complete with formal syntax, as recently happened in Nicaragua. And adults speaking on the telephone will gesture even knowing they cannot be seen. Granted, people gesture in private at a significantly lower rate than they do face-to-face, but the fact that they do it at all is a bit of a puzzle, since the gestures can’t be serving a communicative function in these contexts. Does the gesturing help the speakers actually think, or at least make meaning more clear to themselves? Susan Goldin-Meadow and her colleagues think so.
We also know from video conversation data that adults spontaneously invent new gestures all the time in conversation, then reuse them. Interestingly, though, each reuse becomes more attentuated, simplified, and stylized with repetition. Similar effects are seen in the development of sign languages and in written scripts.
But just how embodied can a label be when gesture (and other embodied experience) is just a memory, and is so internalized that is is externally invisible? This has actually been tested experimentally. The Stroop effect has been known for decades, for example: when the word “red” is presented in blue text, it is read or acted on more slowly than when the word “red” is presented in red text—or in socially neutral black text. That’s on the embodied perception side of things. But more recent psychophysical experiments have demonstrated a similar psychomotor Stroop-like effect when spatial and motion stimulus sentences are semantically congruent with the direction of the required response action. This effect holds even for metaphorical words like “give”, which tests as motor-congruent with motion away from oneself, and “take”, which tests as motor-congruent with motion toward oneself.
I understand how counterintuitive this stuff can be when you first encounter it—especially to intelligent folks who work with codes or words or models a great deal. I expect the two of us will never reach a consensus on this without looking at a lot of original data—and who has the time to analyze all the data that exists on all the interesting problems in the world? I’d be pleased if you could just note for future reference that a body of empirical evidence exists for the claim. That’s all.
What do you mean by “fully” ? I believe I understand you well enough for all practical purposes. I don’t agree with you, but agreement and understanding are two different things.
I’m not sure what you mean by “merely refer”, but keep in mind that we humans are able to communicate concepts which have no physical analogues that would be immediately accessible to our senses. For example, we can talk about things like “O(N)”, or “ribosome”, or “a^n +b^n = c^n”. We can also talk about entirely imaginary worlds, such as f.ex. the world where Mario, the turtle-crushing plumber, lives. And we can do this without having any “physical context” for the interaction, too.
All that is beside the point, however. In the rest of your post, you bring up a lot of evidence in support of your model of human development. That’s great, but your original claim was that any type of intelligence at all will require a physical body in order to develop; and nothing you’ve said so far is relevant to this claim. True, human intelligence is the only kind we know of so far, but then, at one point birds and insects were the only self-propelled flyers in existence—and that’s not the case anymore.
Furthermore, your also claimed that no simulation, no matter how realistic, will serve to replace the physical world for the purposes of human development, and I’m still not convinced that this is true, either. As I’d said before, we humans do not have perfect senses; if physical coordinates of real objects were snapped to a 0.01mm grid, no human child would ever notice. And in fact, there are plenty of humans who grow up and develop language just fine without the ability to see colors, or to move some of their limbs in order to point at things.
Just to drive the point home: even if I granted all of your arguments regarding humans, you would still need to demonstrate that human intelligence is the only possible kind of intelligence; that growing up in a human body is the only possible way to develop human intelligence; and that no simulation could in principle suffice, and the body must be physical. These are all very strong claims, and so far you have provided no evidence for any of them.
Let me refer you to Computation and Human Experience, by Philip E. Agre, and to Understanding Computers and Cognition, by Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores.
Can you summarize the salient parts ?
But wait; whether all possible minds must rely on such a mechanism is the entire question at hand! Humans implement this feature in some particular way? Fine; but this thread started by discussing what AIs and robots must do to implement the same feature. If implementation-specific details in humans don’t tell us anything interesting about implementation constraints in other minds, especially artificial minds which we are in theory free to place anywhere in mind design space, then the entire topic is almost completely irrelevant to an AI discussion (except possible as an example of “well, here is one way you could do it”).
Er, what? I thought I was a member of a European culture, but I don’t think this is how I use the word “there”. If I point to some direction while facing somewhere, and say “there”, I mean… “in the direction I am pointing”.
The only situation when I’d use “there” in the way you describe is if I were describing some scenario involving myself located somewhere other than my current location, such that absolute directions in the story/scenario would not be the same as absolute directions in my current location.
If this is accurate, then why on earth would we map this word in this language to the English “there”? It clearly does not remotely resemble how we use the word “there”, so this seems to be a case of poor translation rather than an example of cultural differences.
Yeah, actually, this research I was aware of. As I recall, the Native Americans in question had some difficulty understanding the Westerners’ concepts of speaker-relative indexicals. But note: if we can have such different concepts of indexicality, despite sharing the same pointing digits and whatnot… it seems premature, at best, to suggest that said hardware plays such a key role in our concept formation, much less in the possibility of having such concepts at all.
Ultimately, the interesting aspect of this entire discussion (imo, of course) is what these human-specific implementation details can tell us about other parts of mind design space. I remain skeptical that the answer is anything other than “not much”. (Incidentally, if you know of papers/books that address this aspect specifically, I would be interested.)