David Hanson on Why Characters Are Key to Friendly Artificial Intelligence

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David Hanson on Why Characters Are Key to Friendly A.I.

The human mind is hardwired for social cognition and face-to-face interactions. This explains people’s powerful attraction to fictional characters in entertainment and literature, and why characters inspire such strong emotions in people, even love. This effect could extend to A.I.-driven character machines, if we can make their intelligence humanlike enough to act like protagonists. Currently robots and agents may look extremely humanlike, but possess only rudimentary cognitive A.I. They are not yet fully gratifying as characters. People are deeply discerning of social intelligence in the human form, and so to realize the potential for enchanting, lovable protagonists, A.I. must closely emulate human emotions and cognition, as well as appearance. Character machines need more than the mere illusion of awareness. The machines must truly understand us, exhibit genuine compassion and creativity. We must witness the machines learn and grow, fill with wonder and hope, and strive towards goals, see them struggle and overcome. The machines must learn to form deep, caring relationships with people, and attain true love and wisdom. As protagonist machines obtain these capabilities, they will grow more desirable to consumers. This feedback loop among consumer demand for lovable characters, technical development of product that better satisfies people, and requisite new scientific insights, could propel the evolution of strong, friendly A.I. over coming years. Hence, humanlike character intelligence holds promise as an approach for the pursuit of safe, singularity-level machine intelligence.

the power of character.

There is persistent demand for characters. Entertainment is based on characters. The success of Avatar and Pixar for computer generated characters.

modeling people helps us understand people better

Reverse engineering people


Defining character
* Agency, creates deep illusion of life, so that Story can happen. (defn of story, the accomplishment of goals, the evolution of relationships, and/or personal evolution)

* Moral character
* able to get along with people

* able to find solutions, greatest common benefit over longest time.

Because people innately respond to humanlike form.


* even newborns, recognize faces and facial expressions

Intelligent character media market opportunities
video games -sims, world of warcraft, club pengiun.
The total virtual character market is greater than $35 billion annually and growing 18% per year

Hanson robotics blog


Apollo mind initiative

Character engine

Zeno boy robot is a product that they want to sell for $2500.
He is testing the uncanny valley and finds that using the techniques of art (michelangelo sculpture) lets you create near realistic that does not cause uncanny valley problems

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