Digital Computers will Always be Machines

I believe I can make this categorical statement about the lack of capacity for agency in Deep Blue and comparable systems, because they are entirely, or at core, digital. Since they are digital, we know that they are fully deterministic; there is no behaviour they can exhibit that is not reliably traceable, after the fact, to some external source. The source could be the programmer, or a stimulus from the environment, or a combination, but is always external to the digital system.

However, robotic agency is far from a simple issue. In recent years, some members of the AI research community have been pursuing directions other than conventional Digital/'Strong AI', focusing instead on embodied intelligence, or 'situated AI'. Here, the objective is to create robots whose intelligence is a result of their physicality and environment (while also having a computational component).

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