Page 58 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

Developing Agents Who Can Relate to Us 41

Although such agents do not have access to the basic decision making
processes they do have access to and can report on their linguistic self-
model which is a model of their decision making (which is, at least,
fairly good). Thus, they do have a reportable language of thought, but
one which is only a good approximation to the underlying basic decision
making process.

The model allows social and self reflective thinking, limited only by
computational resources and ingenuity - there is no problem with unlim-
ited regression, since introspection is done not directly but via a model
of one’s own thought processes.

5. Towards Implementing Self-Constructing Agents
The above model gives enough information to start to work towards an im-
plementation. Some of the basic requirements for such an implementation are
thus:

1 A suitable social environment (including humans)

2 Sufficiently rich communicative ability - i.e. a communicative language
that allows the fine-grained modelling of others’ internal states leading
to action in that language
3 General anticipatory modelling capability

4 An ability to distinguish the experience of different types, including the
observation of the actions of particular others; ones own actions; and
other sensations

5 An ability to recognise other agents as distinguishable individuals

6 Need to predict other’s decisions
7 Need to predict one’s own decisions

8 Ability to reuse model structures learnt for one purpose for another

Some of these are requirements upon the internal architecture of an agent,
and some upon the society it develops in. I will briefly outline a possibility for
each. The agent will need to develop two sets of models.

1 A set of models that anticipate the results of action, including commu-
nicative actions (this roughly corresponds to a model of the world includ-
ing other agents). Each model would be composed of several parts: - a
condition for the action - the nature of the action - the anticipated effect
of the action - (possibly) its past endorsements as to its past reliability