Page 55 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

38 Socially Intelligent Agents

development in important respects - i.e. by socially situating it within a human
culture.
The implementation details that follow derive from a speculative theory of
the development of the human self that will be described. This may well be
wrong but it seems clear that something of this ilk does occur in the develop-
ment of young humans [23] [14]. So the following can be seen as simply a
method to enable agents to develop the required abilities - other methods and
processes may have the same effect.

2. The Inadequacy of the Design Stance for Implementing
a Deeper Sociality

I (amongst others) have argued elsewhere that if an agent is to be embedded
in its society (which is necessary if it is to have a part in the social constructs)
then one will not be able to design the agent first and deploy it in its social con-
text second, but rather that a considerable period of in situ acculturation will
be necessary [10]. In addition to this it seems likely that several crucial aspects
of the mind itself requires a society in order to develop, including intelligence
[14] [13] and free-will [12].
Thus rather than specify directly the requisite social facilities and mecha-
nisms I take the approach of specifying the social "hooks" needed by the agents
and then evolve the social skills within the target society. In this way key as-
pects of the agent develop already embedded in the society which it will have
to deal with. In this way the agent can truly partake of the culture around it.
This directly mirrors the way our intelligence is thought to have evolved [18].
In particular I think that this process of embedding has to occur at an early
stage of agent development for it to be most effective. In this paper I suggest
that this needs to occur at an extremely basic stage: during the construction of
the self. In this way the agent’s own self will have been co-developed with its
model of others and allow a deep empathy between agents and its society (in
this case us).

3. A Model of Self Construction
Firstly I outline a model of how the self may be constructed in humans. This
model attempts to reconcile the following requirements:

That the self is only experienced indirectly [16].

That a self requires a strong form of self-reference [20].

That many aspects of the self are socially constructed [7].

”Recursive processing results from monitoring one’s own speech” [5].