Page 25 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

8 Socially Intelligent Agents

This research was followed by the development of various pieces of software—
among others, an agent capable of analyzing telephone quality speech and to
distinguish between two emotional states—‘agitation’ and ‘calm’—with good
accuracy.

2.3 Social Agent Communities
Although it has always been an important aspect of agents that they dis-
tribute computation using local reasoning, the consequences of this in terms
of the increased complexity of coordination between the agents were realized
more slowly. Thus, in recent years, there has been a move away from designing
agents as single units towards only studying and implementing them as whole
societies. For the kind of intelligence that is necessary for an individual to be
well adjusted to its society is not easy to predict without it being situated there.
Not only are there emergent societal dynamics that only occur in that context
but also the society facilitates adaptive behaviors in the individual that are not
possible on its own. In other words not only is society constructed by society
(at least partially) but also the individual’s intelligence is so built. The authors
in this section of the book are all involved in seeking to understand societies of
agents alongside the individual’s social intelligence.
In chapter 10 Juliette Rouchier uses observations of human social intelli-
gence to suggest how we might progress towards implementing a meaningful
social intelligence in agents. She criticizes both the complex designed agent
approach and the Artificial Life approach as failing to produce a social life that
is close to that of humans, in terms of creativity or exchange of abstractions.
She argues that agents will require a flexibility in communicative ability that
allows to build new ways of communicating, even with unknown entities and
are able to transfer a protocol from one social field to another. A consequence
of this is that fixed ontologies and communication protocols will be inadequate
for this task.
Hidekazu Kubota and Toyoaki Nishida (chapter 11) describe an implemented
system where a number of "artificial egos" discursively interact to create com-
munity knowledge. This is a highly innovative system where the artificial egos
can converse to form narratives which are relayed back to their human counter-
parts. The associative memory of the egos is radically different from those of
traditional agents, because the idea is that the egos concentrate on the rele-
vance of contributions rather than reasoning about the content. This structure
facilitates the emergence of community knowledge. Whether or not this style
of approach will turn out to be sufficient for the support of useful community
knowledge, this is a completely new and bold style which will doubtlessly be
highly influential on future efforts in this direction.