[dragonwriter]

> A multi-cellular embodied intelligence can acquire information about the patterns of the physical world by growing in it - the code is compact because much of the necessary information can be acquired during embodied growth.

Not sure why you think "embodied growth" is essential here; having a compact code base that can be supplemented by information during maturation obviously has some utility, but why would you think embodied growth is critical to it?

> A disembodied intelligence such as AIs can't rely on external storage and acquisition of information during a cellular growth stage

AIs aren't disembodied. They have physical substrates, just like natural intelligences.

I don't see why something like cellular growth is necessary for "external storage and acquisition of information" during development. Even if it were, however, just as natural multicellular organisms are coordinated colonies of self-reproducing cells, artificial organisms (intelligent or otherwise) could be coordinated colonies of self-reproducing machines.

AIs are not disembodied; they obviously are embodied in physical machines. And there's no reason an AI couldn't acquire information during development,

[magicalist]

I think the GP's point is just that there is unaccounted-for information about existing in the physical world encoded into that embodiment. AI will also have embodiment, and there will necessarily be information stored there, but a great deal of operational information will have to be learned and explicitly expressed in the AI itself. To use your example, an artificial organism could be made of coordinated colonies of machines, but cells already have a huge head start in the way they bind to one another, transport materials within and without, respond to various signaling agents, etc. Down to the basic molecular building blocks of the cellular machinery has been selected to (attempt to) optimize operation across all actions that cell might take.

The argument isn't that that embodiment is necessary for the artificial system to learn how to operate in a way that's as capable or better, just that there's a whole lot of information there not accounted for in the genetic code alone.