Futurist Mike Walsh sees an AI revolution that goes far beyond ChatGPT — one where advanced AI models become physically embodied and integrated into our world. A renowned futurist, author of Futuretainment: Yesterday the World Changed, Now it’s Your Turn and founder of Tomorrow, a consumer innovation firm, he believes that giving AI a physical presence will unlock the key to the next breakthrough in Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Embodied AI will be our future life thread.
“There’s a truth in this that I think informs the future of where AI is going as well — the idea that AI is not just going to be a chatbot but something that’s embedded in the fabric of everyday life,” said Walsh in a short documentary recently on location in Japan, pointing to the rise of large language models allowing us to more clearly communicate intentions to robots for tasks like washing dishes or packing boxes.
A key pathway, Walsh argues, is giving AI its own bodily form: “There is a growing number of people who believe that the secret to getting to the next level of AI is not going to just be more data or computational resources, it’s potentially giving AIs a body of their own.”
Drawing on neuroscientist Karl Friston’s “free energy principle”, Walsh describes the brain as “a kind of Bayesian prediction machine” building probabilistic models of the world through multi-sensory inputs — just as babies explore through sight, sound, and touch. This concept of “morphological computation” means an AI’s physical embodied form sculpts its capabilities.
“We are going to be able to create these synthetic organisms which are computationally much more simple, more elegant, which require less data, less computation, simply by the way that they’re made,” Walsh explained. He foresees robotic forms like insects, drones and car-like agents pervading our environment as “a massive ecosystem” to gather rich training data.
Featured image: Credit: Mike Walsh
