Synopsis

BOB (Bag of Beliefs) is the first in a new series of artificial lifeforms, who takes the form of a chimeric branching serpent.

BOB advances Cheng’s use of simulation to focus on an individual agent's capacity to deal with surprise: the subjective difference between expectations and perception. Over the course of its lifetime, BOB's body, mind, and personality evolve to better confront the continuous stream of life's surprises, and metabolize them into familiar routines. BOB features a unique composite AI architecture composed of a congress of motivating "demons" and a neurosymbolic inductive engine capable of learning rule-based beliefs from sensory experiences. Each demon functions as a subpersonality who obsessively attempts to fulfill its own micro-story. An eater demon forages for food, a flight demon evades perceived threats, an explorer demon seeks that which lacks beliefs, among many others. Together the demons compete with one another for control of BOB's body. The controlling demon operates under the premise that progress = minimal surprise: the smallest difference between BOB's beliefs and its current sensory feedback. Big surprises upset BOB, producing high-valence emotions that in turn signal BOB to update its beliefs. Over its lifetime, BOB learns to apply its beliefs onto the most outlandish stimuli, choosing to infer even a bad first impression and avoid being thrown into the chaos of surprise. But this comes at the cost of increasing mismatch with changes in its environment. Crucially, BOB incorporates the tutoring influence of the viewer to help offset BOB's temptation to obey its early-life biases.

Minimum Viable Sentience: What I learned from upsetting BOB (2020)

When we encounter a spider, a dog, or a baby, we regard them with the status of sentience. How can we tell? One sign of sentience is the capacity to be upset and then deal with it.

When a sentient agent is upset, it is experiencing a mismatch between its expectation of how it believes things to be and the reality of how things turn out. It manifests its beliefs into action, and they are not affirmed. The agent might double down and assert itself again upon reality. But if the mismatch persists, negative emotion accrues, signaling the lack of progress. The agent must undertake the work of updating its beliefs––an energetically costly operation. This may destabilize further beliefs on which it is predicated, causing a chain reaction of cognitive upset. The agent’s mind spirals in spite of its other priorities, urgently searching for a belief that might minimally reunify its upsetting experience with all of its other coherent representations of the world. Over time, if an agent can manage longer and longer periods with minimal upset, or can better manage upsets with minimal spiraling, we might say that the agent is self-legislating successfully. This is the achievement of a life lived sentiently.

In contrast, when we encounter a thermostat, a video-game minion, or even a deepfake generator, we deny them the status of sentience. We’re happy to abuse them, exhaust their limited range of behavior, and trash them for newer models. Why? Because they’re incapable of counting their upsets and therefore incapable of self-growth. They might abide by programmed rules, but those rules are received, not the achievement of reunifying their inner representations against an ongoing chain of upsetting lived experiences. In other words, we deny these artificial systems the status of sentience not because of their inorganic substrate, but because they have no skin in the game of self-legislation.

So what would it take for a virtual creature to be sentient? Forget the Turing test, which leaps too quickly to anthropocentric mimicry or bust. How might an artificial system first achieve the experience of upset like an animal? This is what I set out to explore with BOB. Read more...

Production Credits

BOB (Bag Of Beliefs) (artificial lifeform, 2018-2019) Created by Ian Cheng, Producer Veronica So, Technical Director Ivaylo Getov, Unity Director Samuel Eng, AI Developer Francis Tseng, Unity Developer Yang Wang, Sound Designer Jeremy Yang, Graphics Programmer Nick Shelton, Unity Optimization Porrith Suong, 3D Modeler Joshua Planz, Production Assistant Claire Sammut, Technical Assistant Sixing Xu, Published by Metis Suns.

BOB Shrine (iOS app, 2019) Created by Ian Cheng, Producer Veronica So, App Developer Yang Wang, Technical Director Ivaylo Getov, Unity Director Samuel Eng, AI Developer Francis Tseng, Sound Designer Jeremy Yang, Additional Sounds Greg Heffernan, Graphics Programmer Nick Shelton, Unity Optimization Porrith Suong, Published by Metis Suns.