The big idea here is all about giving artificial intelligence agents more agency. According to the researchers: Basically, there’s something other than just algorithms and architecture that makes our brains tick. According to the researchers, this “dark matter” is social interactions. They argue that AI must be capable of “subjective awareness” in order to develop the necessary neurological connections required to display advanced cognition. Per the paper: Making an AI as smart as a human isn’t a simple matter of building bigger supercomputers capable of running faster algorithms. Current AI systems are nowhere near the cognition abilities of a human. In order to bridge that gap, the researchers say agents will need three things:
Biological plausibility Temporal dynamics Social embodiment
The “biological plausibility” aspect involves creating an AI architecture that imitates the human brain’s. This means creating a subconscious layer that’s distinct from, yet connected to, a dynamic consciousness layer. Because our subconsciousness is intrinsically-related to controlling our body, the scientists appear to propose building AI with a similar brain-body linkage. According to the researchers: As for “temporal dynamics,” the researchers suggest that artificial agents need to be able to exist in the world in much the same way as humans do. This is similar to how our minds work in that we don’t just interpret information, we process it in relation to our environment. The body schema contains layers of valuable information that help control and predict stable and dynamic properties of the body; in a similar fashion, the attention schema helps control and predict attention. One cannot understand how the brain controls the body without understanding the body schema, and in a similar way one cannot understand how the brain controls its limited resources without understanding the attention schema. As the researchers put it: This makes understanding how time affects both an agent and its environment a necessary component of the proposed models. And that brings us to “social embodiment,” which is essentially the creation of a literal body for the agent. The researchers claim the AI would need to be capable of social interaction on a level playing field. According to the paper: Ultimately, there’s no true road map toward human-level AI. The researchers are attempting to bring the worlds of cognitive and computer science together with engineering and robotics in a way we haven’t seen before. But, arguably, this is just another attempt to squeeze a miracle out of deep learning technology. Short of a new calculus or class of algorithm, we might be as close to human-level AI agents as traditional reinforcement learning can take us.
