For artificial intelligence to move to the next level, it needs to understand the goals and beliefs of others. This is a skill that was once considered inaccessible.But new research shows that emotionally smart machines are on the horizon
technology
February 14, 2023
Holly Fuller
Superhuman artificial intelligence is already within us. I agree. Computers are far ahead of us when it comes to playing games like chess and Go, or solving tough scientific problems like predicting protein structure. But we still have one superpower that we’re not even close to mastering.
Humans have an amazing ability to infer the goals, desires, and beliefs of others. This is an important skill that means you can predict the consequences of the actions of others and your own. However, reading minds is so easy for us that we often don’t even bother to spell out what we want. Similar intuitive abilities need to be established to cooperate effectively or, in the case of self-driving cars, to understand that a child might run out onto the road after a bouncing ball.
The problem is that it’s much more difficult than training a chess grandmaster. This includes dealing with the uncertainty of human behavior and requires the flexible thinking that AI has typically struggled with. But recent developments, such as game-playing AIs that have learned to cooperate with humans, and AIs that thrive in hide-and-seek, show that socially savvy machines are far from a pipe dream. Moreover, thinking about others could be a step towards the larger goal of self-aware AI.
“This is what you need to understand if you want to integrate robots and AI in general into your life in a seamless way,” said Hod Lipson of Columbia University in New York. “We must let evolution give us the gift of reading other people’s minds.”
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