Comment by ilaksh

Many researchers may be interested in making minds that are more animal-like and therefore more human. While this makes sense to certain extent to gain capabilities, if you take it too far then you run into obvious problems.

There is enough science fiction demonstrating reasons for not creating full-on digital life.

It seems like for many there is this (false) belief that in order to create a fully general purpose AI, we need a total facsimile of a human.

It should be obvious that these are two somewhat similar but different goals. Creating intelligent digital life is a compelling goal that would prove godlike powers. But we don't need something fully alive for general purpose intelligence.

There will be multiple new approaches and innovations, but it seems to me that VLAs will be able to do 95+% of useful tasks.

Maybe the issues with brittleness and slow learning could both be addressed by somehow forcing the world models to be built up from strong reusable abstractions. Having the right underlying abstractions available could make the short term adaptation more robust and learning more efficient.