From Autistic to Social Agents

The theory, models and architectures of intelligent agents are based loosely on the theory of intentions from Bratman resulting in the so-called BDI agents. Although this functions well for single agents it has been long recognized that this approach falls short for multi-agent systems. It lacks appropriate social aspects to make natural interaction possible. The original concept for intelligent agents was based on a (simple) idea of how people reason about actions. We propose that we go back to the foundation and acknowledge that people are in the core social beings. I.e. we don't function as rational agents with the addition of some "sociality" modules to make us aware of other people. Rather we are social at the base and this sociality pervades all our reasoning, motivation, and any other aspect of our behavior. In this paper we propose a new set of core cognitive elements to replace the BDI approach and discuss the paradigm of a social landscape. However, although we aim for a radical change in the way the community creates social agents we also believe that the new approach incorporates previous work, such as BDI. Our claim is that deliberation about actions and BDI are certainly a part of how agents cope with a dynamic world, but are not the core part of social agents that are part of a social world interacting with other agents and humans in a natural way.