Beyond autonomy : the self and life of social agents

Agents have gained popularity nowadays as virtual assistants and companions of their human users supporting daily activities in many aspects of personal life. Designed to be sociable, an agent engages its user(s) to communicate and even develop friendships. Rather than just as a lifeless toy, it is supposed to be perceived as an individual with its own personality, experiences, and social life. In this paper, we seek to highlight self-hood as another dimension that characterizes an agent. Besides levels of autonomy and reasoning, an agent can be defined based on its capacity to process and reflect on its own self as an individual that possesses identity, embodiment, mind (mental), social relationship with others, and experiences comprising memories about the past and future prospects. We argue that this self-awareness is necessary for a companion agent to engage seamlessly with people as a real actual individual. Some existing implementations and models from preliminary works on agent's self-awareness illustrate the feasibility and challenges to realize this concept. Beyond assistance and companionship, we also envisage that this model of self is applicable to other types of autonomous application and system involving extensive interaction with people potentially tackling moral and ethical issues.NRF (Natl Research Foundation, S’pore)Published versio