Our current, smartest AIs are masters of words. They have been trained on zillions of words. Their education consists of the knowledge we have written down into new books and journals. They are smarty pants, the classroom genius that has read everything. But not only have the AIs read most books, they actually remember everything they have read. The LLMs today have a PhD level of knowledge in literally every subject, which makes them powerfully book smart.
But they often lack common sense, and when they are given a body, as in a robot, they flail, flounder, and stall because they have no embodied intelligence. They don’t know about reality. Operating in the real world takes a different kind of intelligence than book smartness. The smartness of a body as it moves in the world requires an intuition about gravity, and lightning fast visual perception, and an awareness of three dimensions – up, down, front and back – and many other basic responses that we humans have learned over millions of years of evolution and is baked deep into our reflexes. That kind of embodied spatial intelligence has yet to be trained into our AIs.