The first Chomskyan argument looks plausible (though still speculative) to me, but I share your skepticism of the ‘embodiment problem’ claim that a body and rich set of senses are necessary prerequisites. Anyone seduced by that argument should consider the life story of Helen Keller, who did have two-way interaction with the world, but only through the biological equivalent of a teletype.
>I share your skepticism of the ‘embodiment problem’ claim that a body and rich set of senses are necessary prerequisites. Anyone seduced by that argument should consider the life story of Helen Keller, who did have two-way interaction with the world, but only through the biological equivalent of a teletype.
Helen Keller had smell, taste, touch, and proprioception all functioning. In what way did she have no senses but a teletype?
Low-bandwidth is something of an understatement, especially when we consider activities like language acquisition, where smell, taste and proprioception play little part. Are the advantages of the dimensionality of this case sufficient to rescue the author's assertion that the embodiment problem requires robotics for its solution? Note that he used vision in his examples.
It occurred to me later that one can argue that Helen Keller, like the rest of us, was born with a brain shaped by hundreds of millions of years of interacting with the environment. I do not doubt that interaction is probably an essential part of us getting to AI, but I doubt that physical embodiment is the only way to do it.
