[dsjoerg]

"Can AI grow corn?"

Let's step back.

"there's a gap between digital and physical that AI can't cross"

Can intelligence of ANY kind, artificial or natural, grow corn? Do physical things?

Your brain is trapped in its skull. How does it do anything physical?

With nerves, of course. Connected to muscle. It's sending and receiving signals, that's all its doing! The brain isn't actually doing anything!

The history of humanity's last 300k years tells you that intelligence makes a difference, even though it isn't doing anything but receiving and sending signals.

[recursive]

I can't tell which side you're arguing here. But if the AI was strapped onto a roomba that rolled around and planted, watered and harvested the corn, I would count that.

[formerly_proven]

It's extremely funny to me but this is basically the literal premise of season two of Person of Interest. Yeah d'uh it's just a computer how would it actually do anything? Well it just goes ahead and tells people to do stuff and wires them money. Easy.

[Windchaser]

Though a computer could also just control robots that actually plant, weed, water, and harvest the corn. That's a pretty big difference from just 'coordinating' the work.

An AI that can also plant corn itself (via robots it controls) is much more impressive to me than an AI just send emails.