Glamour muscles: why having a body is not what it means to be embodied
This work challenges foundational assumptions in AI and robotics about embodiment, potentially redefining how intelligence is understood and developed, though it is theoretical and incremental in its critique.
The paper critiques the concept of embodiment in AI, arguing that having a physical body or movement in space is not inherently meaningful for intelligence, and proposes that true embodiment involves the ongoing negotiation of a body's function and integrity, suggesting that non-physical programs could be more embodied than robots.
Embodiment has recently enjoyed renewed consideration as a means to amplify the faculties of smart machines. Proponents of embodiment seem to imply that optimizing for movement in physical space promotes something more than the acquisition of niche capabilities for solving problems in physical space. However, there is nothing in principle which should so distinguish the problem of action selection in physical space from the problem of action selection in more abstract spaces, like that of language. Rather, what makes embodiment persuasive as a means toward higher intelligence is that it promises to capture, but does not actually realize, contingent facts about certain bodies (living intelligence) and the patterns of activity associated with them. These include an active resistance to annihilation and revisable constraints on the processes that make the world intelligible. To be theoretically or practically useful beyond the creation of niche tools, we argue that "embodiment" cannot be the trivial fact of a body, nor its movement through space, but the perpetual negotiation of the function, design, and integrity of that body$\unicode{x2013}$that is, to participate in what it means to $\textit{constitute}$ a given body. It follows that computer programs which are strictly incapable of traversing physical space might, under the right conditions, be more embodied than a walking, talking robot.