Specialization

AI programs are frequently criticized for being insufficiently general. ("narrow" AI) But perhaps AIs should be more specialized than humans are. Humans are employed and work in environments that are quite different from the ones which they were adapted to by evolution. Humans are probably too generalized for the specialties they practice in the modern world.

Qualia

Humans, animals, robots will each have a different subjective experience of the SAME environmental stimuli. By “subjective” we then mean that any sensory input is filtered by: sensor nonlinearities and limitations, any preprocessors, the set of learned internal concepts available to be activated, any activation of internal concepts that have previously received  activation, etc. The internally “processed and interpreted” signal is the subjective qualia which will be somewhat different in each creature/agent.

Resolving natural language ambiguities

Natural languages suffer from ambiguities.* Each word in Toki Pona has more than one meaning. If sensory inputs are present when A.s.a. hears/sees a word then these may offer sufficient context so as to resolve the ambiguity. When reading Toki Pona A.s.a. will have had various concepts activated by previously input words and sentences. This will also provide some context for subsequent word-sense disambiguation.

* See, for example, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, 4th edition, Russell and Norvig, Pearson, 2020, page 252.

Reconfigurable robots

Reconfigurable* robots make it easier to prototype and adapt robots for new environments and experiments. About one third of my robots are fully reconfigurable.**

* not self-reconfigurable
** like Lego, Vex, Meccano, Ubtech Jimu, etc.

A.s.a. H. Reading

A.s.a. H. has a basic understanding of the Toki Pona language. Stories like Where the Wild Things Are have been translated into Toki Pona.* A.s.a. can then read and learn them.** A.s.a. could be taught the 36 dramatic situations in this way.

* Any translation software is acting as a preprocessor, in effect performing dimensionality reduction.

** I’ve been using period or pause to signal the end of a temporal sequence. Is this the “correct”/only/“best” thing to do?