Design Perceptive

I’m in the second, and final, semester of Senior Design in the Computer Science program at the University of Texas at Arlington.  One of the requirements of this curriculum is to sit a panel discussion.  Each member of the panel must give a 10 – 15 minute presentation and then be prepared to discuss and answer questions.  My panel sits about 4 weeks from now.  Naturally, but unlike some of my fellow students, I’m preparing now.  I mean, this type of thing is part of what I want to do for a career.

Anyways, the topic I’ve been assigned is “What are the social implications of artificial general intelligence?”  Yeah, I know I could fill an entire semester with this topic, but I only have an hour in which I must present and represent.  So, I’m trying to come up with a decent presentation that introduces the concept of AGI, discusses some of the popular conceptions of what happens when we do create AGI and what the social implications might be.

Going through this exercise is synthesizing some of my own thoughts.  Though they might not be novel, I’m writing them down here as a way to remember the path; a breadcrumb if you will.  It may be that I find support in the literature for these ideas, find that someone has already thought of these, etc.  That would be fine – I just need to get them out.

First, it seems to me that motivation is a key element in AGI.  Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs might then play an interesting role as part of a motivational system for a generally intelligent agent.   I’ll be looking into this concept and discussing more of it here later.