Body Machinery and Intelligence

Abstract

This work has a purpose that could be described as somewhat contrived. On the one hand, it can be understood as a review of recent advances in robotics, neuromorphic computing, morphological control, and embodied artificial intelligence (AI) that have revived interest in the relationship between physical structure and intelligent behavior, thus reviving a long-neglected tradition. On the other hand, this case is used to illustrate an increasingly common practice in academia: the use of AI tools as a substitute for the careful and thorough reading of relevant literature to grasp the fundamentals of a subject, and for the effort to achieve efficiency and clarity of expression. By providing ChatGPT with selected documents on the historical foundations and current proposals of the aforementioned topics, the machine synthesizes them and concludes by proposing a layered architecture for future robots. Some aspects of the obtained result are discussed in the appendix.