3. Robots vs. AI

By definition, a robot is an artificial intelligence in the general sense. It has a baseline level of intelligence in its ability to take sensory inputs, make decisions, and effect change within its physical environment.

However, AI has come to take on a more nuanced meaning of late. It often refers to pure software programs and neural networks such as transformers, diffusion models and large language models that exist in the digital world with no physical bearings. Chatbots or generative art programs are what most of the public would equate with AI. By virtue of not being a material construct in the physical world, it would be difficult to define AI programs of this nature as robots.

By defining artificial intelligence as it relates to robots, we can help tease out the distinction between AI that is purely software, and artificially intelligent robots.

Artificial intelligence is intuitive cognition in an engineered construct.

⁹ involves a sense of "knowing based on unconscious information processing", while ¹⁰ refers to "all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used". ¹¹ is "the aggregate or global capacity of the individual to act purposefully, to think rationally, and to deal effectively with his environment."

A software system is a distinctly digital non-physical construct, created through code, programmed to run functions entirely in the digital realm. This definition of artificial intelligence does not however differentiate between digital or physical constructs, simply ones that have been engineered vs. naturally occurring. Thus so long as an AI system has an embodiment or housing in any physical form, it shall be known as a robot.

This will be outlined further in Structura Robotica, where all robots and artificial intelligence are classified under the realm of robotica. As one of the three realms for entities with the capacity to evolve a higher intelligence, robotica includes all artificial constructed intelligences.