Can intelligence be separated from the body?

What is the relationship between the mind and the body?

The mind may be like the controller of a video game;

he moves his body around the world and takes him on fun rides.

Or maybe the body manipulates the mind when it's hungry, sleepy and anxious, sort of like a river leading a canoe.

Is the mind like electromagnetic waves going in and out of our fluorescent bodies?

Or is it a car on the road?

A ghost on the team?

Perhaps there is no metaphor that is quite adequate because there is no distinction between the mind and the body.

There is only experience or some kind of physical process, an interacting whole.

Paolo Pirjanian, founder of Embodied, in the company's lab in Pasadena, California.

(Alex Welsh/The New York Times)

These questions, which have plagued philosophers for centuries, are taking on renewed urgency as computers powered by artificial intelligence begin to infiltrate society.

In a sense, chatbots like

and

have minds.

As they have been trained in a huge amount of natural language, they have learned to generate new combinations of text, images and even video.

If trained in the right way, they can express desires, beliefs, hopes, purposes, and love.

They can talk about introspection and doubt, self-confidence and regret.

But some AI researchers say the technology won't reach true intelligence or true understanding of the world until it works with a body that can sense, react to, and feel its environment.

Diagnosis

For them, it is wrong and even dangerous to speak of intelligent minds that do not have a body.

An artificial intelligence that is not capable of exploring the world and knowing its

in the way that children discover what they can and cannot do, could make fatal mistakes and achieve their goals at the cost of the well-being of human beings.

"In a very simple way, the body is

of judicious and intelligent behavior," said Joshua Bongard, a robotics specialist at the University of Vermont.

"The way I see it, it's the only path to healthy artificial intelligence."

In a lab in Pasadena, California, a small team of engineers has spent the last few years developing one of the first combinations involving a very large language model and a body:

it is a turquoise robot called Moxie, which is almost the size of a 12-month-old child.

This robot has a teardrop-shaped head, soft hands, and lively green eyes.

Inside its rigid plastic body is a computer processor that runs the same type of software as the ChatGPT and GPT-4.

The makers of

who belong to a start-up called Embodied, describe the device as "the world's first robot friend with artificial intelligence."

The robot was conceived in 2017 to help children with developmental disorders work on their emotional awareness and their communication skills.

When someone speaks to Moxie, its processor converts the sound into text, and this text feeds a very large language model, which in turn generates a physical and verbal response.

For example, Moxie can roll her eyes to

for the death of our dog and she can also smile to encourage us to go to school.

The robot also has sensors that receive visual cues and respond to body language

of the people around it.

“It's almost like wireless communication between humans,” said Paolo Pirjanian, a robotics specialist and founder of Embodied.

“We literally started to feel it in the body.”

Pirjanian noted that the robot gets better at this type of exchange over time, just like a friend does as they get to know us.

Researchers at

, the parent company of

, have taken a similar approach to embed extensive language models into physical artifacts.

In March, the company announced success with a robot it called

, which could take in visual features of its environment and information about its own body position, and translate all into natural language.

This allowed the robot to know where it was in space relative to other things and then open a drawer and pull out a bag of chips.

Experts say that these types of robots will be able to perform basic tasks without special programming.

It seems they could pour you a glass of soda, make you lunch, or lift you off the ground after a bad fall, all in response to a series of very simple commands.

Connection

But many researchers have doubts that the mind of these artifacts, being structured in this modular way, will really be connected to the physical world and, therefore, will never be able to display fundamental aspects of human intelligence.

Boyuan Chen, a robotics expert at Duke University who is working on the development of intelligent robots, pointed out that, being determined by years of evolution, the human mind—or, for that matter, the mind of any other animal—is inseparable

from the way the body acts in the real world and how it reacts to it

Human babies learn to pick up objects long before they learn to talk.

The robot mind, with its artificial intelligence, was built entirely on language and often makes common-sense mistakes that result from training procedures.

It lacks a

, Chen said.

"I believe that intelligence cannot be born without having the perspective of physical manifestations."

Recently, some specialists, including Pirjanian, expressed in a letter their concern about the possibility of generating an artificial intelligence that, selflessly, could outperform human beings in the pursuit of some goal (such as producing paper clips from efficiently), or that could be used for nefarious purposes (such as in disinformation campaigns).

The letter called for a

of training on models more powerful than the GPT-4.

Bongard, like many other scientists in the field, thought the letter requesting a suspension of the research might give rise to ill-informed scaremongering.

But he worries about the dangers of our ever-advancing technology and believes that the only way to provide physical AI with a solid understanding of its own limitations is through constant trial and error as it navigates the real

. .

Let's start with simple robots, he said, "and when they show they can do things safely, let's give them more arms and legs, more tools."

Thus, perhaps with the help of a body, a true artificial mind will arise.

c.2023 The New York Times Company

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