Video games are essential for inventing artificial intelligence
Recently having become a father has made me think a lot about general intelligence. Seeing my son getting excited about his &#x27;world state changing&#x27; gave me an idea. What if the main thing that holds us back is the reliance on cost functions? Human, and to some extent, animal intelligence is the only intelligence we know about. If that&#x27;s what we want to emulate, why don&#x27;t we try modelling <i>emotions</i> as the basic building blocks that drive the AI forward? Until now, the way I understand neuronal nets, we have basically modelled the neurons and gave them something to do. My hunch is that brain chemistry is what&#x27;s driving us actually forward, so what if we model that as well? Instead of seratonin, endorphin etc. we could also look at it at a higher level, akin to Pixar&#x27;s Inside Out - joy, fear, sadness, disgust, anger, and I would add boredom.<p>Let&#x27;s stay with video games for a bit. What if we look at joy as &#x27;seeing the world change&#x27;, graded by the degree of indirection from our inputs (the longer it cascades, the more joy it gets). Maybe let it have preference for certain color tones and sounds, because that&#x27;s also how games give us hints about whether what we do is good or not. Boredom is what sets us on a timer - too many repetitions of the same thing and the AI gets bored. Fear and disgust is something that comes out of evolutionary processes, so it might be best to add a GA in there that couples success with some fear like emotion. Anger, well, maybe wait with that ;-).<p>Edit: Oh, and for the love of god, please <i>airgap</i> the thing at all times...