Andy Clark at Edge:
The big question that I keep asking myself at the moment is whether it’s possible that predictive processing, the vision of the predictive mind I’ve been working on lately, is as good as it seems to be. It keeps me awake a little bit at night wondering whether anything could touch so many bases as this story seems to. It looks to me as if it provides a way of moving towards a third generation of artificial intelligence. I’ll come back to that in a minute. It also looks to me as if it shows how the stuff that I’ve been interested in for so long, in terms of the extended mind and embodied cognition, can be both true and scientifically tractable, and how we can get something like a quantifiable grip on how neural processing weaves together with bodily processing weaves together with actions out there in the world. It also looks as if this might give us a grip on the nature of conscious experience. And if any theory were able to do all of those things, it would certainly be worth taking seriously. I lie awake wondering whether any theory could be so good as to be doing all these things at once, but that’s what we’ll be talking about.
A place to start that was fun to read and watch was the debate between Dan Dennett and Dave Chalmers about “Possible Minds” (“Is Superintelligence Impossible?“ Edge, 4.10.19). That debate was structured around questions about superintelligence, the future of artificial intelligence, whether or not some of our devices or machines are going to outrun human intelligence and perhaps in either good or bad ways become alien intelligences that cohabit the earth with us. That debate hit on all kinds of important aspects of that space, but it seemed to leave out what looks to be the thing that predictive processing is most able to shed light on, which is the role of action in all of these unfoldings.
More here.