Attention and Consciousness in Intentional Action: Steps Toward Rich Artificial Agency
Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness March 1, 2020 P. Bello, Will Bridewell
For artificial agents to participate in human social and cultural life, their behavior should be explainable using folk psychological concepts like beliefs, desires, obligations, and especially intentions. Drawing on philosophy and psychology, the authors argue that attention is critical for intentional action and agency. They contend that existing AI and cognitive systems research has not adequately developed computational architectures that incorporate these insights. To address this gap, they present the ARCADIA attention-driven cognitive system as an initial step toward an architecture capable of supporting the kind of agency required for rich human–machine interaction.