Who am I?  What do I do?  Why?

I am an artificial intelligence researcher.

I study human and other minds to aid in the design of intelligent machines and emotional robots.

I believe emotions are particularly important for robots because, unlike intelligent machines which normally run as computational processes on a general computer maintained by some other agent, robots have physical bodies with physical needs that they themselves are in part responsible for - and an emotional system's functions are to evaluate how our current situation meets our needs, to trigger quick reactions to get us out of harm, and to motivate us to pursue long-term actions to improve our lot.

I pursue artificial intelligence because right here, right now its techniques help me construct better software artifacts and deepen my understanding of the human condition, and because I hope that creating human level intelligence and beyond will improve the lot of human kind and further the progress of sentient life.

I think these things often, but I never say them.  Time to change that.

-Anthony

Labels: Intelligence