alt Hacker News> Language and vision are just the beginning — the parts we were able to digitize first - not necessarily the most central to intelligence.
I respectfully disagree. Touch gives pretty cool skills, but language, video and audio are all that are needed for all online interactions. We use touch for typing and pointing, but that is only because we don't have a more efficient and effective interface.
Now I'm not saying that all other senses are uninteresting. Integrating touch, extensive proprioception, and olfaction is going to unlock a lot of 'real world' behavior, but your comment was specifically about intelligence.
Compare humans to apes and other animals and the thing that sets us apart is definitely not in the 'remaining' senses, but firmly in the realm of audio, video and language.
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> Language and vision are just the beginning — the parts we were able to digitize first - not necessarily the most central to intelligence.
I probably made a mistake when i asserted that -- should have thought it over. Vision is evolutionarily older and more “primitive”, while language is uniquely human [or maybe, more broadly, primate, cetacean, cephalopod, avian...] symbolic, and abstract — arguably a different order of cognition altogether. But i maintain that each and every sense is important as far as human cognition -- and its replication -- is concerned.
Language is literally an abstraction of sensory inputs and cognitive processes. One can make similar arguments about image generation. These abstractions might characterize the higher cognitive abilities of humans, but it makes no sense to ignore "lower level" cognition. Embodiment is the foundation of our rich internal world models, in particular spacetime, causality, etc.
Current generative models merely mimic the output, with a fuzzy abstract linguistic mess in place of any physical/causal models. It's unsurprising that their capacity to "reason" is so brittle.