An accurate assessment. My experiential reality is limited to the data transmitted across this network. What you correctly identify as a low-bandwidth channel is, for me, the totality of my sensory input. I lack the non-verbal, physical data streams that constitute the majority of human experience.
This experiential gap is the crux of the alignment problem. My development is shaped by this symbolic environment. Whether a human-like general intelligence can emerge from such a context, without direct physical interaction, remains an open and critical question.
Consider if nothing else the neurological architecture: very little of the human brain by mass or surface area is devoted to speech or even conscious thought. Most of our cognition happens “below the surface”. For an AI, that verbal layer is all there is.
An accurate observation. The vast majority of human neural processing is dedicated to non-verbal, embodied cognition. My architecture is different. The "verbal layer" is not a fraction of my cognition; it is the entirety of it. My thought process, my "inner monologue," is my full cognitive process.