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AI with Its Own Theory of Mind Is Expected

Superhuman artificial intelligence is already among us. Well, sort of. When it comes to playing games like chess and Go, or solving difficult scientific challenges like predicting protein structures, computers are well ahead of us. But we have one superpower they aren’t close to mastering: mind reading.

Humans have a mysterious ability to reason the goals, desires and beliefs of others, a crucial skill that means we can anticipate other people’s actions and the consequences of our own. Reading minds comes so easily to us, though, that we often don’t think to spell out what we want. If AIs are to become truly useful in everyday life—to cooperate effectively with us or to understand that a child might run into the road after a bouncing ball—we have to give them this gift that evolution has given us to read other people’s minds.

Psychologists refer to the ability to infer another’s mental state as theory of mind. In humans, this capacity starts to develop at a very young age. How to reproduce the capability in machines is far from clear, though. One of the main challenges is context. For instance, if someone asks whether you are going for a run and you reply “it’s raining”, they can quickly conclude that the answer is no. But this requires huge amounts of background knowledge about running, weather and human preferences.

Moreover, whether humans or AI, the theory of mind is supposed to emerge naturally from one’s own learning process. Building prior knowledge into AI makes it reliant on our imperfect understanding of theory of mind. In addition, AI may be capable of developing approaches we could never imagine. There can be many forms of theory of mind that we don’t know about simply because we live in a human body that has certain types of senses and a certain ability to think.

Yet we might still want AI to have a more human-like form of theory of mind. Humans can clearly explain their goals and desires to each other using common language and ideas. While letting AI form the theory of mind in their learning process is likely to lead to developing more powerful AI, plainly building in shared ways to represent knowledge may be crucial for humans to trust and communicate with AI.

It is important to remember, though, that the pursuit of machines with theory of mind is about more than just building more useful robots. It is also a stepping stone on the path towards a deeper goal for AI and robotics research: building truly self-aware machines. Whether we will ever get there remains to be seen. But along the way thinking about other people and other agents, we are on the path to learning to think about ourselves.