Raising Agents: Sources of Human Social Intelligence

This paper urges that if we wish to give social intelligence to our agents, it pays to look at how we acquired our social intelligence ourselves. Our drives and motives are innate and deeply social. Next, as children we are socialized to acquire norms and values. This motivational and group-based life is the core of our being in the real world. As a consequence, economic rationality or logical reasoning will only take agents so far when it comes to social intelligence. In order to advance our understanding of social intelligence, and to build socially versatile agents, we need to complement our attention for the ‘what’ and ‘how’ with attention for the ‘why’ and ‘with whom’. Basic features of our social behaviour, of the kind that one sees early in the lives of children, need to be prominent. These include basic drives, such as avoidance and fear, approach and love, aggression when thwarted. They also include recognizing distinctions relevant to those drives, such as big and small, good and bad. They extend to the combination of these basic drives with basic social clues from the environment, leading agents to differentially respond to inferred attributes such as gender, age, group membership. This level of universality in social intelligence should receive our full attention. The general insights gained can then be reused in myriad implementations to specific modelling issues.