Language enabled artificial intelligence

AI resarch in the past was dominated by an algorithm centric bias. The goal was mostly to invent an advanced computer program which simulates intelligence. The idea was inspired by a chess engine which is searching in the game state for the next action. Robotics projects were engineered with the same objective. Notable algorithms are RRT for kinodynimaic planning or genetic algorithm for artificial life.

In the 1990s and until 2000s this paradigm was accepted as state of the art attempt to realize artificial intelligence. Unfortunately. none of the described techniques was successful. The robots are not working and the Artificial life simulation didn't evolve into a life form.

There was something missing until the 2000s for enabling artificial intelligence, and the missing element is natural language. On the first look this explanation doesn't make sense because there are lots of examples for text adventures and language understanding AI projects in the past, so the principle isn't new and can't be the explanation how to realize AI. Typical well known examples from the past are SHDRLU, the Maniac mansion game which was based on a simple 2 word 'English parser and a speech enabled robot from 1989 (SAM by Michael Brown). 

The breakthrough technology after 2010 was to focus again on language guided robotics and implement these projects with more effort. Instead of programming a video game like Maniac mansion the goal was to program a text interface for robot control. Instead of realizing the parser in a simple C code, the parser is realized with a neural network. So we can say, that AI after the year 2010 has put natural language into the center of attention and created new algorithms and software around the problem. This attempt was very successful. It is possible to control robots with language and very important its even possible to scale up the approach so that the robot will understand more words and solve more demanding tasks.

From a birds eye perspective the situation until 2010 was to implement closed systems. AI was imagined as an autonomous system which is operating with algorithms and has no need to talk to its environment. In contrast, AI after the year 2010 works as open system. The robot receives commands from the human operator and sends signals back to the operator. In other words, modern robotics is always remote controlled with a text based interface. Its not possible to implement Artificial intelligence somehow else, but text based interaction is the core element of any AI system.

Its only a detail question how to program such an open system in detail. One attempt might be to utilize neural networks and learn the language from a dataset. Another attempt is to program the parser in a classical computer program without neural networks, while the third technique is to invent a domain specific language used for human to robot interaction. All these approaches have in common that natural language is the core building block. Natural language is used as an abstraction mechanism to compress the complex reality into a list of words. A typical entry level robot knows around 200 words to describe the environment including possible actions. These words are used by the robot to interact with a human operator. So the AI problem is mostly a communication problem, similar to transmit messages over a wire.

The paradigm shift from former computation into modern communication is the breakthrough technology for enabling artificial intelligence. Natural language used for human communication is also a powerful tool for human to robot communication. The English vocabulary is seen as a hammer for solving problems. Any problem in robotics gets reformulated into a language problem. There is no limit visible, but all the problems like biped walking, navigation in a maze and pick&place can be reformulated as language games.

Such kind of utilization of natural language wasn't available before the year 2010. The only thing known were isolated projects which explored if language might be useful for robotics. There was no understanding available that natural language is the core element in AI and needs to implemented in any possible robot or AI problem.