Live and Learn, Ask and Tell: Agents over Tasks

Steven Spielberg’s “A.I.” tells the story of two artificial agents: David and Teddy. While David resembles a human child, his companion Teddy is much simpler. Its behavior, however, still suggests a crucial mix of capabilities that stretch the state of the art in AI today. We argue that, unlike most contemporary AI, Teddy qualifies as a bona fide agent, and that implementing such a system would represent a valuable advance in our understanding of agency. We then describe a project to integrate our existing work to create a simple agent with Teddy-like capabilities.