Mark Stefik

Mark Stefik, Robert Price

Developmental AI creates embodied AIs that develop human-like abilities. The AIs start with innate competences and learn more by interacting with the world including people. Developmental AIs have been demonstrated, but their abilities so far do not surpass those of pre-toddler children. In contrast, mainstream approaches have led to impressive feats and commercially valuable AI systems. The approaches include deep learning and generative AI (e.g., large language models) and manually constructed symbolic modeling. However, manually constructed AIs tend to be brittle even in circumscribed domains. Generative AIs are helpful on average, but they can make strange mistakes and not notice them. Not learning from their experience in the world, they can lack common sense and social alignment. This position paper lays out prospects, gaps, and challenges for a bootstrapping approach to developmental AI that follows a bio-inspired trajectory. The approach creates experiential foundation models for human-compatible AIs. A virtuous multidisciplinary research cycle has led to developmental AIs with capabilities for multimodal perception, object recognition, and manipulation. Computational models for hierarchical planning, abstraction discovery, curiosity, and language acquisition exist but need to be adapted to an embodied learning approach. The remaining gaps include nonverbal communication, speech, reading, and writing. These competences enable people to acquire socially developed competences. Aspirationally, developmental AIs would learn, share what they learn, and collaborate to achieve high standards. They would learn to communicate, establish common ground, read critically, consider the provenance of information, test hypotheses, and collaborate. The approach would make the training of AIs more democratic.

Mark Stefik

The vision of AI collaborators is a staple of mythology and science fiction, where artificial agents with special talents assist human partners and teams. In this dream, sophisticated AIs understand nuances of collaboration and human communication. The AI as collaborator dream is different from computer tools that augment human intelligence (IA) or intermediate human collaboration. Those tools have their roots in the 1960s and helped to drive an information technology revolution. They can be useful but they are not intelligent and do not collaborate as effectively as skilled people. With the increase of hybrid and remote work since the COVID pandemic, the benefits and requirements for better coordination, collaboration, and communication are becoming hot topics in the workplace. Employers and workers face choices and trade-offs as they negotiate the options for working from home versus working at the office. Many factors such as the high costs of homes near employers are impeding a mass return to the office. Government advisory groups and leaders in AI have advocated for years that AIs should be transparent and effective collaborators. Nonetheless, robust AIs that collaborate like talented people remain out of reach. Are AI teammates part of a solution? How artificially intelligent (AI) could and should they be? This position paper reviews the arc of technology and public calls for human-machine teaming. It draws on earlier research in psychology and the social sciences about what human-like collaboration requires. This paper sets a context for a second science-driven paper that advocates a radical shift in technology and methodology for creating resilient, intelligent, and human-compatible AIs (Stefik & Price, 2023). The aspirational goal is that such AIs would learn, share what they learn, and collaborate to achieve high capabilities.

Mark Stefik

Today's robots do not learn the general skills needed for such services as providing home care, being nursing assistants, or doing household chores. Addressing such aspirational goals requires improving how AIs and robots are created. Today's mainstream AIs are not created by agents learning from experiences doing real world tasks and interacting with people. They do not learn by sensing, acting, doing experiments, and collaborating. This paper investigates what aspirational service robots will need to know. It recommends developing experiential (robotic) foundation models (FMs) for bootstrapping them.