AGI Development Chapter Discusses Cognitive Development Theory

Chapter 11 Stages of Cognitive Development Co-authored with Stephan Vladimir Bugaj 11.1 Introduction Creating AGI, we have said, is not only about having the right structural and dynamical possibilities implemented in the initial version of one’s system — but also about the environment and embodiment that one’s system is associated with, and the match between the system’s internals and these externals. Another key aspect is the long-term time-course of the system’s evolution over time, both in its internals and its external interaction — i.e., what is known as development. Development is a critical topic in our approach to AGI because we believe that much of what constitutes human-level, human-like intelligence emerges in an intelligent system due to its engagement with its environment and its environment-coupled self-organization. So, it’s not to be expected that the initial version of an AGI system is going to display impressive feats of intelligence, even if the engineering is totally done right. A good analogy is the apparent unintelligence of a human baby. Yes, scientists have discovered that human babies are capable of interesting and significant intelligence — but one has to hunt to find it ... at first observation, babies are rather idiotic and simple-minded creatures: much less intelligent-appearing than lizards or fish, maybe even less than cockroaches... If the goal of an AGI project is to create an AGI system that can progressively develop advanced intelligence through learning in an environment richly populated with other agents and various inanimate stimuli and interactive entities — then an understanding of the nature of cognitive development becomes extremely important to that project. Unfortunately, contemporary cognitive science contains essentially no theory of “abstract developmental psychology” which can conveniently be applied to understand developing Als. There is of course an extensive science of human developmental psychology, and so it is a natural research program to take the chief ideas from the former and inasmuch as possible port them to the AGI domain. This is not an entirely simple matter both because of the differences between humans and Als and because of the unsettled nature of contemporary developmental psychology theory. But it’s a job that must (and will) be done, and the ideas in this chapter may contribute toward this effort. We will begin here with Piaget’s well-known theory of human cognitive development, present- ing it in a general systems theory context, then introducing some modifications and extensions and discussing some other relevant work. 187 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013103