Editorial: Conceptual Commitments of AGI Systems

What are the most important design principles that we should follow to build an Artificial General Intelligence? What should be the key constituents of systems-level models of cognition and behavior? In the target article “Conceptual Commitments of the LIDA Model of Cognition”, Stan Franklin, Steve Strain, Ryan McCall, and Bernard Baars tackle these difficult problems. They propose twelve “conceptual commitments” or tentative hypotheses that form the core of the Learning Intelligent Distribution Agent (LIDA) model that they have been developing over the last ten years or so. Although the article is focused on the LIDA model, these “conceptual commitments” have much broader scope and are offered to the AGI community as specific constraints that should inform the research agenda for the realization of an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The twelve specific “conceptual commitments” are of various kinds and have different degrees of importance for LIDA and AGI more generally. Some (Systems-level Modeling, Global Workspace Theory, Learning via Consciousness, Feelings as Motivators and Modulators of Learning, Transient Episodic Memory) are considered to be key for LIDA and also more broadly for AGI. These are general mechanisms of learning, memory and inference that should form the core of realistic, real-world architectures of brain and behavior. Of particular note, the authors highlight the importance (among the other things) of feeling and consciousness, which are regarded as fundamental architectural solutions to the problems of AGI. These themes, which were given minor importance in traditional cognitive (neuro)science and AI, have increasingly gained prominence in the last few years. Putting these themes at center of AGI research is a distinguishing aspect of the proposal of Franklin and collaborators.