Men Are Dogs (and Women Too)

One of the primary differences between humans and other animals is our capacity for high level cognition and the use of language. Historically, AI has understandably focused on duplicating these aspects of human behavior, and selected its architectures accordingly. However, humans are nevertheless social mammals and share a large part of the mammalian behavior repertoire, such as feeding, as well as social behaviors, such as attachment, affiliation, territoriality, and the formation of dominance hierarchies. In this paper, I will argue that for all our unique capabilities, the mammalian behavior hardware, whatever it may be is still active in humans, and that for applications such as virtual characters for interactive drama, we should begin from architectures based on our commonalities with other social mammals, rather than from our unique capabilities.