(At Transvision 2007)

‘Rosedale mentioned the possibility of creating AI avatars that could learn from interacting with the avatars of humans in Second Life. “I find it very likely that any artificial intelligence we create will live first in a world like this,” said Rosedale.

Rosedale’s last observation flowed nicely into the next talk by Novamente AI researcher Ben Goertzel. Goertzel wants to create baby AI’s that can learn and insert them into virtual worlds where human avatars can teach them. He suggested creating them as virtual pets, perhaps a parrot or a cat, that would be embodied, reflective, and could use adaptive learning. People in virtual worlds like Second Life could teach AI avatars not only tricks, but also about space, objects and even to talk. Whenever any one of the AI avatars learned something new it could be transferred immediately to all of the other AI avatars. With millions of virtual world residents teaching AI avatars, they could rapidly acquire artificial general intelligence’.

More interesting ideas at Ben Goertzel’s blog (Novamente CEO and chief scientist)

« Ben Goertzel presents at Transvision07On the Merits of Parrots
(On the Merits of Parrots … or: “The Wisdom of Crowds” as a Strategy for Educating Young AI’s)

In this blog post I’ll enlarge upon a point I made during my recent talk at TransVision 2007 (see a recent blog post by Bruce discussing this talk), regarding the potential of virtual worlds to help in accelerating the path of AI’s toward mastery of human language.

(This is just an example of a more general point: The more I think about the direction Novamente has chosen to take over the next few years — seeking to roll out intelligent virtual agents widely throughout 3D and 2D virtual worlds and MMOG’s — the more I become convinced that it’s a very positive direction from a pure-AGI perspective as well as from a business perspective.)

As a specific example, one vision that’s been haunting me lately is a virtual talking parrot. A simple idea, of course — but very powerful in its AI implications. Imagine millions of talking parrots spread across different online virtual worlds — all communicating in simple English. Each parrot has its own local memories, its own individual knowledge and habits and likes and dislikes — but there’s also a common knowledge-base underlying all the parrots, which includes a common knowledge of English.

[Bruce Klein w/ parrot at Novamente’s Second Life HQ]

Now, suppose that an adaptive language learning algorithm is set up (based on, oh, say, the Novamente Cognition Engine), so that the parrot-collective may continually improve its language understanding based on interactions with users. If things go well, then the parrots will get smarter and smarter at using language, as time goes on. And, of course, with better language capability, will come greater user appeal.

The idea of having an AI’s brain filled up with linguistic knowledge via continual interaction with a vast number of humans, is very much in the spirit of the modern Web. Wikipedia is an obvious example of how the “wisdom of crowds” — when properly channeled — can result in impressive collective intelligence. Google is ultimately an even better example, I think — the PageRank algorithm at the core of Google’s technical success in search, is based on combining information from the Web links created by multi-millions of Website creators. And the intelligent targeted advertising engine that makes Google its billions of dollars is based on mining data created by the pointing and clicking behavior of the one billion Web users on the planet today. Like Wikipedia and Google, the mind of a talking-parrot tribe instructed by masses of virtual-world residents will embody knowledge implicit in the combination of many, many peoples’ interactions with the parrots.

Another thing that’s fascinating about virtual-world embodiment for language learning is the powerful possibilities it provides for disambiguation of linguistic constructs, and contextual learning of language rules.

Michael Tomassello, in his excellent book Constructing a Language, has given a very clear summary of the value of social interaction and embodiment for language learning in human children.

For a virtual parrot, the test of whether it has used English correctly, in a given instance, will come down to whether its human friends have rewarded it, and whether it has gotten what it wanted. If a parrot asks for food incoherently, it’s less likely to get food — and since the virtual parrots will be programmed to want food, they will have motivation to learn to speak correctly. If a parrot interpret a human-controlled avatar’s request “Fetch my hat please” incorrectly, then it won’t get positive feedback from the avatar — and it will be programmed to want positive feedback.

Yes, humans interacting with parrots in virtual worlds can be expected to try to teach the parrots ridiculous things, obscene things, and so forth. But still, when it comes down to it, even pranksters and jokesters will have more fun with a parrot that can communicate better, and will prefer a parrot whose statements are comprehensible.

What it comes down to is: A virtual parrot, learning language, will have lots of teachers, and that’s a good thing. The more customers we get for the parrot, the more teachers the AI underlying the parrot will have.

A baby AI has a lot of disadvantages compared to a baby human being: it lacks the intricate set of inductive biases built into the human brain, and it also lacks a set of teachers with a similar form and psyche to it … and for that matter, it lacks a really rich body and world.

However, the presence of thousands to millions of teachers constitutes a large advantage for the AI over human babies. And a flexible AGI framework, like the Novamente Cognition Engine, will be able to effectively exploit this advantage.

On a more theoretical level, this community of individually-acting yet collaboratively-learning parrots may be considered an example of a mindplex, a term I introduced in this essay a couple years back, referring to a collection of minds in which

each individual mind has its own declarative and procedural memories, and sense of self
there is also a collective declarative and procedural memory, and a collective sense of self
Mindplexes tie in interestingly with the notion of the emerging global brain, which I discussed extensively in my 2002 book Creating Internet Intelligence.

Getting back to practicalities: The rate of progress of Novamente LLC in our new business direction is difficult to estimate, as it depends on funding and other related issues. But, if all goes as we’re hoping, we may well be able to release a parrot-that-talks-and-adaptively- learns-to-talk-better sometime before the end of 2008. And that will be pretty exciting!

And of course parrots are not the end of the story. Once the collective wisdom of throngs of human teachers has induced powerful language understanding in the collective bird-brain, this language understanding (and the commonsense understanding coming along with it) will be useful for other purposes as well. Humanoid avatars — both human-baby avatars that may serve as more rewarding virtual companions than parrots or other virtual animals; and language-savvy human-adult avatars serving various useful and entertaining functions in online virtual worlds and games. Once AI’s have learned enough that they can flexibly and adaptively explore online virtual worlds (and the Internet generally) and gather information according to their own goals using their linguistic facilities, it’s hard to see limits to their growth and understanding. (And this leads to various deep and critical ethical concerns, such as I’m exploring with my colleagues at the Singularity Institute for AI.)

But, we need to get there one step at a time. What’s exciting about virtual parrots-that-talk — and the intelligent virtual agents space generally — is the way it poses an incremental path by which getting more and more customers for products is directly connected to making the AI underlying the products smarter and smarter (which in turn will attract more and more customers). This is exactly the kind of virtuous cycle one wants to see in an AI start-up company (in my never-very-humble and admittedly rather biased opinion!).

Many people experiace compassion as an emotion. This doesn’t nessesarily make them ACT compassionatly. I suspect you may have compassion (as the act of helping another ) without any emotional impetous compelling such. One’s helps because it is the logical thing to do. United we stand divided we fall can not an AI understand this simple equation. i believe any AI worth of the title must.

Although he advocates the use of Voice in SL,I am not sure whether he is evidence for the prosecution or the defence of the Voiceless SL Grid. ).

regards Joaz Janus

Funny, I just covered him on my blog as well (GigantiCo), actually just the video from his MIT Media Lab’s Virtual World’s Keynote from last week. Have you seen it? It’s really great (it’s also an hour and forty-five minutes long). He’s an entertaining speaking, it flies by. His entire lecture is about Second Life.

Can I assume you’ve read “Turing’s Man” by J. David Bolter?

There is a Greek riddle, I read it years ago:
If you have a favorite pair of socks, and over the years you patch them time and again, until eventually none of the original fabric remains, is it still the same pair of socks?

I cannot recall where I read the riddle, but I think it may have been one of the stories in Ed Regis’ “The Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition”. Anyway, after putting the riddle out there, it then introduces this fact- Every single atom in a human body is replaced over the course of about every five years.

I got out “Great Mambo Chicken…” as I was writing this, and the book dropped open right to a page (156-157) with this Hans Moravec quote, “Assuming that a human being is fully explained by the physical interaction of his parts… suppose you took a human being and started replacing his natural parts with equivalently functional artificial parts, and you did this on a very small scale, neuron by neuron, or whatever. At the end what you’d have would be something that still worked the same…”

May I ask, have you perhaps read “Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World”, by Kevin Kelly (former Editor in Chief of WIRED) where he makes the case that what we perceive as “consciousness” is merely an emergent property of complex systems, or “On Intelligence” by Jeff Hawkins (founder of Palm Computing, and the Redwood Neuroscience Institute), with dual specialties in computer programming and neuroscience, he is using his entrepreneurial millions to finance research into his own theory of AI. I have a copy of Ray Kurzweil’s “The Singularity is Near” waiting to be read as soon as I finish Howard Bloom’s “Global Brain”.

I will give my blog a plug.
I have a new article up there about Second Life, titled— Virtual Reality: Part 1.

http://GigantiCo.squarespace.com/

I also have the full video of Kapor’s keynote posted as well, if you scroll down further.

Very truly,
Chris
(SL: ChristopherBest Daviau)

The ability to feel and relate to emotion could well represent the cutting-edge of pattern-recognition based forms of intelligence. Having said that, in many ways it might be relatively easy to build ‘emotive’ machines.

There have been some fascinating studies conducted by the roboticist Cynthia Breazel, who built KISMET, a social robot with many simple rulesets driving its ‘emotions’ like ‘excitement’, ‘boredom’, ‘fear’, ‘happiness’. Its facial expressions and tone of voice (it doesn’t speak, it babbles like a baby) change according to its mood. People brought in to interact with the robot soon start engaging it as if it were a real baby, comforting it when it expresses fear, encouraging it to learn when it shows interest in something and so on. They give it emotional cues and they understand its emotional responses.

KISMET’s brain is at least a millionfold simpler than a human’s and soon the limitations of its abilities become aparrent. But whether a Kismet with a brain as powerful as a human’s, and organised to process information like a human’s (neuroscience has tracked down a class of specialised brain cells, called Spindle Neurons, whose purpose seems to be for the processing of emotion) will be as limited is another matter.

‘My reply is also shaped by the flaws in my character, the scratches and dings of a lifetime some would call rather rough, the traits I inherited from my parents.
Power, organization and education are simply not enough, not by a long shot’.

You might say you learned from the ’school of hard knocks’ or ‘the university of life’. A person’s education goes WAY beyond reading, writing and arithmetic. All the stuff you briefly refer to requires exactly the kind of social evolution NEW TIES hopes will emerge.

‘But my reply can still go in any direction…I think that’s where the computer will always lag behind.’

People often think of computers as cold, logical calculating machines fundamentally incapable of the spontaneous creativity of people. But, already things are changing. Some games in development for the latest generation of consoles and PCs (the XBox 360s etc) use physical modelling, procedural animation and emergent rulesets that make KISMET seem possitively, well, robotic, to the extent that situations will arise in-game that suprise even the designers of these very games.

‘2029 seems far too optimistic’. Yes, it does.

The only think I’d take issue with is that your routemap appears to be predicated on a neuron up approach. I suspect that the Turing will actually be passed by something more like a Super-Chatbot approach, ie top down, modelling behaviour rather than mechanics. If you through 10 or 100 times todays processing at the chatbot approach you’d make huge strides but still be well short of a whole-brain processing platform.

We’re busy trying to get SLAIL – the SL AI Laboratory set up for AI researchers in SL to showcase their work. Would be great to have speak there once we’ve got it going.