Everyday you bet your life that you can step on that road, eat that food, see that car coming. You bet your life and in nearly every single case you are right. That is incredible. Anyone who has made tried a hand at AI knows that’s incredible. So why is it that we can do that and yet we haven’t been able to build machines that can too?

The problem comes from many interacting norms and conventions (scientific and political). But it can be stated simply. We think there is a mind between perception and action. The world passes through perception to the mind where a decision is made and a motor program is executed. This is bad for serveral reasons. The passage of world through perception loses accuracy and thus must be predicted. The decision making process must be fast and able to handle vast ammounts of data. The motor program must be perfectly suited to deal with the fact that muscle activation is context dependent. The whole idea is precarious and expensive.

What makes people different? People live. Living is one process. That process involves a brain, a body, and an environment. There will be attributes of the environment that are relevant to the organism, the organism has evolved such that its behaviors reflect those patterns. I walk on grass and can climb a tree. I know I like sweets and mom’s voice makes me feel safe. This is product of a being alive in the world. We don’t recreate the world to make a virtual version so that we can predict reality. We are not solipsistic we don’t hallucinate the world. We are of the world. We experience it and in that experience there are properties of the world that affect us. That is perception. It is to be affected by the world.

This was Gibson’s notion of direct perception. There are robots inspired by these principles. It’s what gave Boston Dynamics the edge to build killer robots for an evil government. So that’s cool but also it gives us a new way to think and when the time comes build better robots.