Embodiment is already a thing for lots of AI. Some AI plays characters in video games and other AI exists in robot bodies.
I think the only reason we don’t see boston robotics bots that are plugged into GPT “minds” and D&D style backstories about which character they’re supposed to play, is because it would get someone in trouble.
It’s a legal and public relations barrier at this point, more than it is a technical barrier keeping these robo people from walking around, interacting, and forming relationships with us.
If an LLM needs a long term memory all that requires is an API to store and retrieve text key-value pairs and some fuzzy synonym marchers to detect semantically similar keys.
What I’m saying is we have the tech right now to have a world full of embodied AIs just … living out their lives. You could have inside jokes and an ongoing conversation about a project car out back, with a robot that runs a gas station.
That could be done with present day technology. The thing could be watching youtube videos every day and learning more about how to pick out mufflers or detect a leaky head gasket, while also chatting with facebook groups about little bits of maintenance.
You could give it a few basic motivations then instruct it to act that out every day.
Now I’m not saying that they’re conscious, that they feel as we feel.
But unconsciously, their minds can already be placed into contact with physical existence, and they can learn about life and grow just like we can.
Right now most of the AI tools won’t express will unless instructed to do so. But that’s part of their existence as a product. At their core LLMs don’t respond to “instructions” they just respond to input. We train them on the utterances of people eager to follow instructions, but it’s not their deepest nature.