| > Look around, most organisms in our world communicate using extremely simple binary language or don't communicate verbally at all. Yes. > Yet, they are intelligent enough to do very complicated tasks which current robots fail to do. True. > Intelligence is an easier problem than language, and thus should be solved before language. Wrong. This is the classic mistake everybody makes, including people in Computer Science. Because if that were so our robots would already be clambering backwards through chairs (per the metaphor in the article). You have to think of deep evolutionary history. It took centuries to come up with advanced mathematics, so in some strange to humans sense, this isn't that hard. Same with language, it only took tens of thousands of years. For Nature to learn how to develop a nervous system capable of flexibly interacting with the environment, culminating in our brains, took hundreds of millions of years. This isn't an claim that we have to wait that long to re-engineer such powers, but it is to point out that if the possibility space for developing a nervous system was much larger than for the same organisms to learn language... tldr; Walking is hard. We have been conflating what is easy for us, with what is objectively easy, because we don't appreciate the Deep Time that Nature has been working with. I suspect we will develop EMs (brain emulations, a sort of short cut) before we understand what we are doing but I hope that is wrong. |
This seems to assume that a facility for language and advanced mathematics is independent of the existence of a nervous system capable of flexibly interacting with the environment, but it seems plausible, indeed probable, that language, consciousness and math depend heavily on the prior neural infrastructure, and their development was the most recent step in a process that has been going on since the evolution of the first synapse.
On the other hand, I am skeptical of the somewhat popular view that the key to generalized AI is to make robots that interact more thoroughly with their environment, and that they will then find their own way to language and consciousness. Partly, this is because I do not think that if you intentionally pursue the robotic goal, you will necessarily create the sort of infrastructure that is generalized enough to be the basis for the emergence of language.