Fusing Animals and Humans

  • Authors:
  • Jonathan Connell

  • Affiliations:
  • IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, jconnell@us.ibm.com

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2008 conference on Artificial General Intelligence 2008: Proceedings of the First AGI Conference
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

AI has many techniques and tools at its disposal, yet seems to be lacking some special “juice” needed to create a true being. We propose that the missing ingredients are a general theory of motivation and an operational understanding of natural language. The motivation part comes largely from our animal heritage: a real-world agent must continually respond to external events rather than depend on perfect modeling and planning. The language part, on the other hand, is what makes us human: competent participation in a social group requires one-shot learning and the ability to reason about objects and activities that are not present or on-going. In this paper we propose an architecture for self-motivation, and suggest how a language interpreter can be built on top of such a substrate. With the addition of a method for recording and internalizing dialog, we sketch how this can then be used to impart essential cultural knowledge and behaviors.