The idea that embodiment is necessary for intelligence is just another example of anthropocentrism.
It's likely that we will soon have AGI that can solve the protein folding problem, play go at a superhuman level, and create arbitrary images from a text prompt, yet still underperform humans when it comes to proprioception and object manipulation.
Humans have evolved specifically for proprioception for billions of years, it's a core survival skill that all animals have in common. In contrast our history of language and abstract thinking only go back less than a million years.
Human brains are overfit to our environment, which is why we're so good at recognizing human faces and so bad at mathematics. A intelligence created from a blank slate need not share our limitations - it could perceive in more than 3 dimensions, it could grasp quantum amplitudes as easily as we understand integers, it could have multiple embodiments and experiences simultaneously.
It's likely that we will soon have AGI that can solve the protein folding problem, play go at a superhuman level, and create arbitrary images from a text prompt, yet still underperform humans when it comes to proprioception and object manipulation.
Humans have evolved specifically for proprioception for billions of years, it's a core survival skill that all animals have in common. In contrast our history of language and abstract thinking only go back less than a million years.
Human brains are overfit to our environment, which is why we're so good at recognizing human faces and so bad at mathematics. A intelligence created from a blank slate need not share our limitations - it could perceive in more than 3 dimensions, it could grasp quantum amplitudes as easily as we understand integers, it could have multiple embodiments and experiences simultaneously.