Creating Sentient Artificial Intelligence

pftq

Abstract: Much of what people refer to as machine learning today is what's considered "weak AI", in that it is not actually thinking, hypothesizing, or behaving with a sense of self. The latter is what some would call "strong AI," "artificial general intelligence" (AGI), or just plainly "artificial intelligence" (as opposed to "machine learning"). Below is a potential approach on how to create an intelligence that behaves like a person would in any circumstance. It's something that I've loosely applied to my own projects, but I've not managed to fully explore it in the general sense due to time and resource constraints. This approach to AI is intended to behave more like a creature or child than anything mechanical or data-driven. If one reflects on intelligence in biological life, it really doesn't make sense that a truly sentient AI would necessarily be useful for big data or other work anymore than a child or dog would be. Somewhere along the line we've managed to water down the term AI to the point it just means anything that helps automate the job of a data analyst. It becomes almost impossible to talk about creating something that behaves like a thinking, autonomous living creature, many on Earth of which would never be at all useful for data-driven work but are nonetheless considered intelligent. The topic is kept at a high level as more of a thought experiment.