Developing Self-Awareness in Robots via Inner Speech.

Antonio Chella,Alain Morin,Arianna Pipitone,Famira Racy

doi:10.3389/frobt.2020.00016

Abstract

The experience of inner speech is a common one. Such a dialogue accompanies the introspection of mental life and fulfills essential roles in human behavior, such as self-restructuring, self-regulation, and re-focusing on attentional resources. Although the underpinning of inner speech is mostly investigated in psychological and philosophical fields, the research in robotics generally does not address such a form of self-aware behavior. Existing models of inner speech inspire computational tools to provide a robot with this form of self-awareness. Here, the widespread psychological models of inner speech are reviewed, and a cognitive architecture for a robot implementing such a capability is outlined in a simplified setup.

Highlights

The idea of implementing self-awareness in robots has been popular in science-fiction literature and movies for a long time
The above arguments are essential for a cognitive architecture for a social robot because any artificial intelligence that successfully interacts with humans should need to be able to use first-person pronouns, self-describe, and be responsive to self-focusing stimuli in its surrounding environment
Several authors have put models of self-awareness development in robots, our approach focuses on inner speech deployment as a privileged method for reaching this elusive goal because of the strong ties that exist between self-awareness and inner speech

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The idea of implementing self-awareness in robots has been popular in science-fiction literature and movies for a long time. The proposed approach focuses on implementing a form of robot self-awareness by developing inner speech in the robot. We present existing approaches to self-awareness deployment in robots, observing that the crucial potential role of inner speech is only marginally addressed. The above arguments are essential for a cognitive architecture for a social robot because any artificial intelligence that successfully interacts with humans should need to be able to use first-person pronouns, self-describe, and be responsive to self-focusing stimuli in its surrounding environment. Attention to the self is essential for self-awareness, but we add that inner speech, at least in humans, is a primary tool for facilitating higherorder self-awareness and the many processes involved, such as memory, attention, reflection, social feedback, evaluation, and others presented earlier. The above analysis justifies the importance of implementing inner speech in robots to implant some form of self-awareness in their architecture

A COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE FOR INNER SPEECH IMPLEMENTATION IN ROBOTS

DISCUSSION

CONCLUSION

ETHICS STATEMENT