Artificial Social Intelligence

Breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have typically shown that AI systems are good at solving specific tasks that have a well-defined goal, such as Speech Recognition, Image Captioning, Games like Poker/Go/Jeopardy, among others. However, as AI systems become ubiquitous, it is not enough for them to solve specific tasks; rather they will have to continuously interact with human-users as well as other AI systems in a rapidly evolving environment. These systems will have to continuously review and evolve their interaction strategies during the ongoing interaction. Goals may not be defined in advance and might evolve dynamically. The systems have to ensure that apart from solving the primary task, the user receives a pleasant and professional experience that is ”socio-culturally appropriate”. In other words, we are quickly moving towards a world where AI systems have to go far beyond functional intelligence–they have to be socio-culturally adept and behaviorally intelligent. We refer to this phenomenon as “Artificial Social Intelligence” and the consequent systems as Socially Intelligent Agents.