Page 56 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

Developing Agents Who Can Relate to Us 39

That one has a ”narrative centre” [8].

That there is a ”Language of Thought” [1] to the extent that high-level
operations on the syntax of linguistic production, in effect, cause other
actions.

The purpose of this model is to approach how we might provide the facil-
ities for an agent to construct its self using social reflection via language use.
Thus if the agent’s self is socially reflective this allows for a deep underlying
commonality to exist without this needing to be prescribed beforehand. In this
way the nature of the self can be develop within its society in a flexible man-
ner and yet there be this structural commonality allowing empathy between its
members. This model (of self development) is as follows:

1 There is a basic decision making process in the agents that acts upon
the perceptions, actions and memories and returns decisions about new
actions (that can include changing the focus of one’s perception and re-
trieving memories).

2 The agent does not have direct access to the workings of this basic pro-
cess (i.e. it cannot directly introspect) but only of its perceptions and
actions, past and present.

3 This basic process learns to choose its actions (including speech) to con-
trol its environment via its experiences (composed of its perceptions of
its environment, its experiences of its own actions and its memories of
both) including the other agents it can interact with. In particular it mod-
els the consequences of its actions (including speech acts). This basic
mechanism produces primitive predictions (expectations) about the con-
sequences of actions whose accuracy forms the basis for the learning
mechanism. In other words the agent has started to make primitive mod-
els of its environment [4]. As part of this it also makes such model of
other agents which it is ’pre-programmed’ to distinguish.

4 This process naturally picks up and tries out selections of the commu-
nications it receives from other agents and uses these as a basis (along
with observed actions) for modelling the decisions of these other agents.
5 As a result it becomes adept at using communication acts to fulfil its
own needs via others’ actions using its model of their decision making
processes.
6 Using the language it produces itself it learns to model itself (i.e. to pre-
dict the decisions it will make) by applying its models of other agents to