Embodied Cognition - Artificial Intelligence and Robotics

Artificial Intelligence and Robotics

Artificial intelligence research before the 1980s simulated intelligence using logic and high-level abstract symbols (an approach called Good old-fashioned AI). This "disembodied" approach ran into serious difficulties in the 1970s and 80s, as researchers discovered that abstract, disembodied reasoning was highly inefficient and could not achieve human-levels of competence on many simple tasks. Funding agencies (such as DARPA) withdrew funding because the field of AI had failed to achieve its stated objectives, leading to difficult period now known as the "AI winter". Many AI researchers began to doubt that high level symbolic reasoning could ever perform well enough to solve simple problems. In recent decades, AI research has achieved a significant amount of success by using "embodied" approaches; that is, by directly simulating the functions we associate with the body (such as perception and motion) without using logic or any similar representation. The experience of AI research provides another line of evidence supporting the embodied mind thesis.