Emotional Developmental Symbol Creation — To create an artificial intelligence similar to humans or other animals, it has to have some way to generate meaning. A potential mechanism of meaning is an emotional system which has built in symbol grounding. Emotional development might be a major factor in how symbol grounding happens in biological creatures. …

Alienness and Human Connections — Many years ago, Ben Bogart asked the question: “What do you consider the most seminal representations of AI in cinema of all time?” At the time I thought the best was yet to come. And I still think that. But this is not going to be me complaining about movie…

One way to increase the intelligence of a robot might be to train it with a series of missions, analogous to the missions or levels in a video game. In a developmental robot, the training would not be simply learning — its “brain” structure would actually change. Biological development shows…

Towards Real Semantics for Strong AI — I talked about “symbol grounding” before in “AI Don’t Know Jack?” but there’s always more to say. As a reminder, they are not necessarily symbols in the old fashioned computer sense — perhaps a better term than symbol grounding is concept grounding¹. Whatever you call it, if one’s goal is…

Web dev, HR, social media writers…nobody is safe! — 1. Web Developers There won’t be much of a web soon, so we won’t need web developers. Everything will transfer into Meta’s Metaverse and Microsoft Mesh. Some of you could transfer your skills into these new “mixed reality” platforms. But even there AI will be doing a lot of work. It’ll do procedural…

The Disillusionment of Math — The Early Years When I was in elementary school, a consultant taught a small group of us some basic algebra. This was amazing to me at the time — solving for the mysterious x! I actually shouted loudly when I solved one of them much to the chagrin of everybody in the room. …

Creating a robot with emotions is a software development problem. — Emotion is a matter of cognitive architecture. It is part of the information system of the mind. Recreating emotions really means recreating a type of mind that uses internal mechanisms similar to our minds. Making an emotional machine requires a proper design and implementation and deployment. The reason I added…

A Different Approach to AI — Back in 2004, when I was an undergrad at Northeastern University in Boston, I started designing a cognitive architecture called Biomimetic Emotional Learning Agents (BELA). It was a grand plan and I’ve barely cracked the surface of it since then. The overreaching nature of the project was noted by a…