Re: Where is behavior AI now?


J.A. Legris wrote:
minsky@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Thanks, Curt, for your always insightful advice. But I have an answer
to your suggestion that "I think he had the right approach at the
beginning and shouldn't have given up on it so quickly." I did return
to work on 'low-level' systems at various times, but only became more
convinced that higher-level, more reflective systems were mainly what
distinguish us from other animals.

[...]

Before we worry about what it is that distinguishes us from animals,
wouldn't it be a reasonable goal to find out first what it is that
distinguishes animals from everything else?




Seems to me, that's pretty much what subsumption and BBR are all about.
How do you tell a rock from a subsumption robot? The rock just sits
there doing nothing [although, as I recall, Curt has some strong
opinions about "rock intelligence" ;-)], while the sub.s-bot both
reacts to and acts upon its environment.

To me [but not to Marvin, given his past comments], the sub.s-bot is
basically a good start at what distinquishes animals from everything
else. Autonomy, sensing, and action. However, as this thread is all
about, the BBR/sub.s approach looks to be basically stalled, and there
doesn't seem to be much [or enough] effort at adding all those levels
in-between the 2 ends Marvin just talked about. I think Brooks' book
Flesh and Machines was really the death-knell of sub.s, and his final
conclusion - there is some "missing stuff" - was totally wrong, as I
mentioned in an earlier post.

I do distinquish the difference between human and animal, in that
humans have "another" level on top that adds high-level symbolic
processing to what the animals have - roughly parallel to the
distinction between higher-order and primary consciousness that Dennett
and Edelman talk about. But you have to start adding those in-between
levels to bridge the gap down to subsumption. Marvin's high-level
commonsense reasoning systems can only work on a proper lower-level
foundation platform that can function successfully in the real world.

For my part, I'm pursuing [and have been for a while] the idea of
adding those in-between levels from the bottom up, which is the same
way organisms evolved intelligence. I just don't think you can do this
from the top down. For one thing, there is too much of an unexplained
gap between the highest-most symbolic levels in humans, and primary
consciousness levels in the other animals. IOW, you don't start with
language first, and then extend that to build the
communications-interaction capability of a monkey. You do it the other
way around. My $0.02.

.

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