Technical discussion on multimodal senses for AGI development

172 9 General Intelligence in the Everyday Human World on the importance of vision processing for humanlike cognition. The key thing an AGI requires to support humanlike “visual intelligence” is an environment containing a sufficiently robust collection of materials that object and event recognition and identification become interesting problems. Audition is cognitively valuable for many reasons, one of which is that it gives a very rich and precise method of sensing the world that is different from vision. The fact that humans can display normal intelligence while totally blind or totally deaf is an indication that, in a sense, vision and audition are redundant for understanding the everyday world. However, it may be important that the brain has evolved to account for both of these senses, because this forced it to account for the presence of two very rich and precise methods of sensing the world — which may have forced it to develop more abstract representation mechanisms than would have been necessary with only one such method. Touch is a sense that is, in our view, generally badly underappreciated within the AT commu- nity. In particular the cognitive robotics community seems to worry too little about the terribly impoverished sense of touch possessed by most current robots (though fortunately there are recent technologies that may help improve robots in this regard; see e.g. [Nan08]). Touch is how the human infant learns to distinguish self from other, and in this way it is the most essential sense for the establishment of an internal selfmodel. Touching others’ bodies is a key method for developing a sense of the emotional reality and responsiveness of others, and is hence key to the development of theory of mind and social understanding in humans. For this reason, among others, human children lacking sufficient tactile stimulation will generally wind up badly im- paired in multiple ways. A good-quality embodiment should supply an AI agent with a body that possesses skin, which has varying levels of sensitivity on different parts of the skin (so that it can effectively distinguish between reality and its perception thereof in a tactile context); and also varying types of touch sensors (e.g. temperature versus friction), so that it experiences textures as multidimensional entities. Related to touch, kinesthesia refers to direct sensation of phenomena happening inside the body. Rarely mentioned in AI, this sense seems quite critical to cognition, as it underpins many of the analogies between self and other that guide cognition. Again, it’s not important that an AGI’s virtual body have the same internal body parts as a human body. But it seems valuable to have the AGI’s virtual body display some vaguely human-body-like properties, such as feeling internal strain of various sorts after getting exercise, feeling discomfort in certain places when running out of energy, feeling internally different when satisfied versus unsatisfied, etc. Next, taste is a cognitively interesting sense in that it involves the interplay between the internal and external world; it involves the evaluation of which entities from the external world are worthy of placing inside the body. And smell is cognitively interesting in large part because of its relationship with taste. A smell is, among other things, a long-distance indicator of what a certain entity might taste like. So, the combination of taste and smell provides means for conceptualizing relationships between self, world and distance. 9.6.2 The Human Body’s Multiple Intelligences While most unique aspect of human intelligence is rooted in what one might call the "cognitive cortex" — the portions of the brain dealing with self-reflection and abstract thought. But the cognitive cortex does its work in close coordination with the body’s various more specialized HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013088