What if the people you talk to, play with and interact with in Second Life weren’t human at all? Granted, none of them is literally human anyway, but almost all of them are actually controlled by someone sitting in front of a computer. Not all are.

You might run into a little, 4 year old child that appears to be reasonably smart and is able to reason about its surroundings. This child is controlled by a program. A program that is able to reason about its own beliefs to draw conclusions in a manner that matches human children its age.

The program is the result of research conducted by a group around Selmer Bringsjord at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. According to ScienceDaily, Bringsjord says:

Truly convincing autonomous synthetic characters must possess memories; believe things, want things, remember things. Such characters can only be engineered by coupling logic-based artificial intelligence and computational cognitive modeling techniques with the processing power of a supercomputer. [...] The logico-mathematical theory will include rigorous, declarative definitions of all of the concepts central to a theory of the mind, including lying, betrayal, and even evil.

Using Second Life as a platform for this makes sense. Reducing the communication bandwidth is a common trick to lower the barrier of believability. Even the good ol’ Alan Turing limited the interaction for his famous Turing test to test if a computer can demonstrate intelligence to a text chat. Second Life is reasonably close to that, avatars can easily be controled by keyboard commands.

Building agents based on the theory of mind (which describes the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires and intentions that are different from one’s own) is a step towards an artificial general intelligence, and thus towards a real threat (or a great opportunity, depends on who you ask). And indeed, this project was presented a couple of days ago at the Artificial General Intelligence conference held at the University of Memphis.

I believe there is a high risk connected to the creation of such an intelligence, it is easy to think of hypothetical scenarios in which a reasoning system concludes that humans are a risk and need to be wiped out. Although testing such an agent in a virtual world is a good idea to realise what it is capable of and evaluating the actual risk of it, once the tools are there the step into the real life will be taken quickly. And sure enough, Selmer Bringsjord has plans to apply the technlogy to education and homeland defense. Good thing the system has no sense of lying, betrayal and isn’t evil…

The researchers want to build an interface with a certain resemblance to the holodecks in Star Trek for direct interaction of agents with human beings. While this definitely sounds like science fiction, it has to be taken seriously. They have the support of strong industrial partners and want to use the worlds most powerful university-based supercomputing system at the CCNI.

The research is still in an early stage and the Second Life results are far away from being strong AI, but they might well bring us closer to an artificial general intelligence, thus raising the AI Panic Level by +1%. I don’t know whether the system they are working on will achieve a level of strong AI (most likely not), and even if it does, we don’t know if it will be good or bad. I’ll finish with a quote from the group’s research homepage, which interestingly enough seems to answer that thought:

An advanced synthetic character, however, can literally be evil, because it has the requisite desires, beliefs, and cognitive powers.

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