Page 47 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

30 Socially Intelligent Agents

to develop joint plans and to carry out coordinated action, and (v) the ability to
form persistent relationships and shared memories with other individuals.
There is some systematic psychological research on the dynamics of close
relationships, establishing for example their connection with attachment [5].
Although knowledge-based cognitive approaches have been used for describing
discourse, there has not yet been much extension to describing relationships [6].
Presumably, a socially intelligent agent would recognize you to be a person,
andassignauniqueidentityto you. It wouldremember youanddevelop detailed
knowledge of your interaction history, what your preferences are, what your
goals are, and what you know. This detailed knowledge would be reflected in
your interactions and actions. It would understand and comply with prevailing
social norms and beliefs. You would be able to negotiate shared commitments
with the agent which would constrain present action, future planning and inter-
pretation of past events. You would be able to develop joint plans with the agent,
which would take into account your shared knowledge and commitments. You
would be able to act socially, carrying out coordinated joint plans together with
the agent.
We would also expect that joint action together with the agent would proceed
in a flexible harmonious way with shared control. No single agent would always
be in control, in fact, action would be in some sense voluntary for all participants
at all times.
To develop concepts and computational mechanisms for all of these aspects
of social relationship amongagents is asubstantial project. Inthispaper, wewill
confine ourselves to a discussion of joint planning and action as components
of social behavior among agents. We will define what voluntary action might
be for interacting agents, and how shared control may be organized. We will
conclude that in coordinated social action, agents voluntarily maintain a regime
of mutual control, and we will show how our agent architecture provides these
aspects of social relationship.

2. Our Agent Architecture

In this section we describe of an agent architecture that we have designed
and implemented [2] [3] and which is inspired by the primate brain. The overall
behavioral desiderata were for an agent architecture for real-time control of an
agent in a 3D spatial environment, where we were interested in providing from
the start for joint, coordinated, social behavior of a set of interacting agents.
Data types, processing modules and connections. Our architecture is a set
of processingmoduleswhich run inparallel andintercommunicate. Wediagram
two interacting agents in the figure. This is a totally distributed architecture with
no global control or global data. Each module is specialized to process only
data of certain datatypes specific to that module. Modules are connected by a