The Eighth Conference on Artificial General Intelligence

The final day of AGI-15 will include a cross-disciplinary workshop, the first-ever

Workshop on Synthetic Cognitive Development and Integrated-Distributed Agency (IDA)

Resulting from a collaboration between the AGI Society (which hosts the AGI conference series) and members of the Global Brain Institute at the Free University of Brussels, this Workshop will focus on issues related to distributed cognitive systems and their role in AGI research.

The human cognitive system is a remarkable exemplar of a general intelligent system whose competence is not confined to a specific problem domain. Evidently, the general cognitive competences of a human being are a product of a lifelong and complex process of cognitive development. Therefore, cognitive development is conceivably a primary key to understanding and realizing the emergence of AGI. While an already consolidated cognitive competence is applicable to a specific and identified problem domain, cognitive development is the very process of sense-making where there is no a priori knowledge about the problem domain and where cognitive competence  is becoming.

The initial scheme of human cognitive development can be  generalized by introducing the concept of continuous individuation – how heterogeneous populations of locally interacting agents may self-organize into scalable cognitive systems with an open-ended range of sense-making capabilities, without a priori determined goals, tasks or behavioural models.

In the workshop we aim to present this approach to AGI and further explore  how synthetic cognitive development can be understood as a process of self-organized sense-making, taking place between alternating “distributed” and “integrated” phases of a population of heterogeneous agents. Further, two cases / projects dealing with the individuation of integrated-distributed agencies as value creation and value exchange networks, will be presented.

The discussion will span multiple disciplines including AI, cognitive science, philosophy, systems theory, sociology and economics.

Schedule

• Keynote: Open-ended Intelligence: The Individuation of Intelligent Agents, Weaver (David Weinbaum), Global Brain Institute, VUB; (video)
  • Weinbaum, David, and Viktoras Veitas. “Open Ended Intelligence: The Individuation of Intelligent Agents”, 2015.
  • Weinbaum, David, and Viktoras Veitas. “Synthetic Cognitive Development: Where Intelligence Comes from”, 2014.
• Offer Networks: Using AI and Optimization Algorithms to Pioneer a Post-Money Economy, Ben Goertzel;
  • Goertzel, Ben. “Beyond Money.” H+ Magazine, March 26, 2014.
• Scalable cognition through collaborative sense-making: drafting the Open Value Network model, Diego González Rodríguez and Ishan Shapiro; (video)
  • bitmind.co: prototyping Open Value Networks for a P2P Society
• Discussion! (video)

For articles, presentation slides and discussion page, please follow this link.