The body is the missing link for truly intelligent machines (2017)
The idea of "embodied AI" has been around for some decades. It is reasonable that, from a practical engineering perspective, creating "human-like" intelligence becomes more feasible if this intelligence is embodied in the same physical possibilities and constraints as a typical human.What I find somewhat ironic is this: the author mentions working with Stephen Hawking, an amazing man who produced incredible intellectual work and enriched our understanding of reality while being almost incapable of any physicality.If we apply current scientific theories (physics, chemistry, biology, etc) to this cell network and physical machinery, we quickly find our way back to symbolic manipulation. What are cells if not computational nodes that exchange messages?A much more reasonable hypothesis for what is missing is contained in the text:"A human cell is a remarkable piece of networked machinery that has about the same number of components as a modern jumbo jet[...]"Maybe we just haven't reached the level of complexity needed for human-level AI. A hint that this might be the case is that the current excitement with ML seems to be fueled by algorithms that were mostly known by the 80s (sure, with lots of recent incremental improvements, but no new big idea). What made a difference was the computational power and datasets that became available in the 2010s. I suspect the next leap will be of a similar nature. "More is different".