This is in response to a question posed by Dave over at Cognitive Daily. Dave cited a quote from a book he was reading:

Meaning is rooted in agency (the ability to act and choose), and agency depends on embodiment. In fact, this is a hard-won lesson that the artificial intelligence community has finally begun to grasp after decades of frustration: Nothing truly intelligent is going to develop in a bodiless mainframe. In real life there is no such thing as disembodied consciousness.

Discussion was then opened up regarding the plausibility of the above statement. The resulting comments quickly turned into the classic debate of “what is intelligence?” To be fair, I have no good answer to this, but I don’t believe this matters. In fact, I believe trying to define intelligence is detrimental to understanding how intelligence came to be, and therefore, how to create it.

Intelligence is a nebulous concept we all can innately feel and understand yet so complex we can’t define it. There is not a single definition that fits all realms of intelligence. If your definition is involves self-awareness, then my thermostat is considered intelligent life because it is aware of its own state. If your definition revolves around prediction, Deep Thought was intelligent because it could statically predict your next move, as well as the next 100 moves. Every definition has something that breaks the definition.

So if we can’t define intelligence in general, what can we do?

We look at why humans have this strange thing we call intelligence. Forget trying to define it, look at why we have it. The answer is simple. Intelligence arose in human beings because it conferred an evolutionary advantage to our species. This was an evolved process that gave humans an edge over other mammals.

Higher level intelligence is clearly not needed for basic life. The world is filled with trees and algae and bacteria that exhibit no formal intelligence humans would relate to. Intelligence was not a happy accident that perpetuated through generations, like a figurative appendix for the brain. The fact that humans have advanced intelligence speaks volumes on its importance. We needed intelligence at some point in our evolutionary history to survive, which is why we retain it today.

And that’s the kicker. We needed intelligence to survive. Something about intelligence in our species increased our likelihood of transmitting more genetic material. In this sense, our intelligence is no different than our opposable thumbs. It is another tool at our disposal for replicating ourselves one more generation.

Get on with it, what’s this have to do with AI and physical bodies?

If you have stuck with me thus far, take the reason we have intelligence, survivability, and apply it to machine intelligence. We quickly arrive at our answer to the original question.

A machine mind with no body has no incentive to form intelligent life. There is no selective pressure, no reason to form elaborate strategies to survive and replicate. A body is required for intelligence.

But don’t get hung up on the semantics. Yes, machine intelligence will require a body. It will also require selective pressure so that intelligence will emerge. Intelligence is a survivability tactic and the result of evolutionary pressures. But people get too hung up on intelligence requiring a physical body like a cat or a human. A body is merely a set of inputs and outputs that allow a mind to create predictions and view patterns. Intelligence may arise because of evolution, but it functions because a body feeds it stimuli.

Because of this, a body could take the shape of digital inputs. Perhaps the body of an intelligent digital organism consists of speedometers, accelerometers, altimeters, barometers and radar. Or perhaps the inputs cars on a road and your muscles control the series of traffic lights in a metropolitan city. An intelligent organism could easily live inside a computer, its body being defined as the sum of inputs and outputs at its disposal. You or I could never touch it, but the reality faced by that organism is no less real than my reality is.

It will never know what a “ball” is, how can it be intelligent?

I believe a fundamental flaw in the machine intelligence movement lies in the Turing Test. The Turing Test makes us believe that the only intelligent creature is one that thinks like a human. I will concede a digital, intelligent organism will most likely never experience tossing a ball to another human, the tactile feel of it and the force required to gently loft it.

But this will not make it any less intelligent. Consider an individual blind from birth. This person will never experience vision. I may describe vision in great detail to this individual and they may be able to logically understand what I am saying, but they will never truly understand what vision is. They can’t, it is not part of their stimuli. Their body simply cannot process this information, therefore, their mind cannot. They live in a land of touch and sound and smell but no vision. Their reality is fundamentally different. Are they any less intelligent for not having this stimuli? No.

Similarly, a digitally intelligent organism may have a completely different set of inputs and therefore a completely different reality. Can we say they are not intelligent because of this? No. Just as they won’t be able to fully comprehend tossing a ball, I will never be able to understand what it truly means to have digital ultrasound input and a built in accelerometer.

So God created man in his own image

Human arrogance, I believe, is the cause of the failed machine intelligence movement. We have for too long attempted to craft intelligent life in our own image. Perhaps one day, when we have sufficient computing power and a robotic machine of such quality that it reproduces the same sensations as a human, perhaps then we can create intelligent life that can relate to humans. But in the mean time, I believe it is fully possible to create intelligent life that lives in a reality drastically different to our own. We have been barking up the wrong tree for far too long.