The use of psychological knowledge in the construction of an artificial personality

This is my first article on Habré, I will be grateful for the help in the design. This is an introductory article, here I set forth my vision of the problem of artificial intelligence, and propose a cycle of texts in which my approach will be revealed. We are talking about the use of theoretical psychology in AI.

For me, programming and related areas are primarily a tool that is used to improve, accelerate, make more efficient the processes of the real world. Everywhere in my work I had to take some kind of subject area, build its model and translate it into a computer program. Therefore, in programmers, I appreciate not only the skill to create a quality system, but also the ability to understand any subject area and build its model that satisfies the conditions of the problem.
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After 10 years of work, I realized that it was not so interesting for me to program tasks that let uncles down from above, write code that will earn more money on derivatives, or how to connect two trading systems, but I want to set myself tasks and to implement. Now I am writing (in June defense) a master's thesis in psychology and I have my own task, one might say, the task of a whole life.

Even before I entered the department of linguistics, after reading Zelazny, the department of artificial intelligence in the RSUH, I dreamed of creating something like the Phantom Wheel, an artificial personality that could manipulate the physical properties of the world, developed and became more and more humane. After many years, I realized for myself that the whole development of disciplines related to artificial intelligence does not converge at the point that is so important to me.

Stanislav Lem (in my opinion in “The Sum of Technologies”) expressed this thought for me. It is quite simple and true even now, in my opinion. Humanity is going to some other side from all the dreams and hopes of science fiction writers of the time. People make more and more perfect stone axes. After all, any of the most sophisticated achievements of intelligent technologies are very, very complex, often autonomous, but just tools — Google’s machines, robots on the conveyor, even Siri and its analogs, especially if you yourself participated in the development of such, these are just automata. fulfilling the goals that the person has set for them.

But I want something else, and I don’t think that only me, judging by the films like “Her,” or Isaac Asimov’s book “I, Robot,” I think anyone will give a thousand examples. There is a dream about creating one’s own kind, about a being that will somehow relate to the world around us, and not just treat, but also experience this attitude. This is a creature that will not serve the goals of man, but set itself goals.

Here the very concept of “artificial intelligence” stands as a very strong obstacle. Now for me it is a certain set of related technologies and knowledge that are able to solve difficult problems well and effectively, many of which a person performs rather well. And it is very strange for me to see enthusiastic comments on the topic of the fact that soon there will be a technical singularity, I cannot imagine that this is possible in the near future.

After all, we are talking about intelligence. The creature that you want to create, it is still like a man who is not reduced simply to intelligence. Even in this branch of psychology, there are such concepts as emotional intelligence (the ability to recognize and control one’s own and other people's emotions), there is dialectical logic (the ability to solve problems in logic without third excluded, very interesting works by N.Ye. Veraks trying to build a mathematical model) , there is a concept of will, finally. A person is first of all a potentially free person, and it is not reduced to intellectual models.

Therefore, I formulated the task for myself in the following way - to develop a model of an artificial personality. In order to better understand how the human psyche works, I was very much impaired, and went to study at the magistracy of the RSUH at the Faculty of Psychology, as well as at the Gestalt therapist at MIGIP (training without practice, in my opinion, is not worth a damn).

As it seems to me now, there are two directions that one way or another can come to the creation of an artificial personality. The movement can be carried out from two sides - from the side of neurophysiology, which understands better and more thoroughly the processes occurring in our nervous system (I want to mention here the articles of Alexey Redozub, with which we have theoretical contradictions, but whose model of emotions is generally confirmed in my master’s thesis), and on the part of theoretical psychology, which is trying to figure out how to build a model that describes the human psyche.

The neurophysiological approach seems reliable to me, but there is a suspicion that the level of computing power that is required for full-fledged research and experiments, humanity will not reach soon, perhaps the development of quantum computers may somehow speed up, but it is not in a hurry.

The psychological approach is closer to me. It seems to me that this is akin to finding a solution or a complete search, or the search for practical approaches that will allow you to get a solution to a given problem faster. Since I formulate the task in terms of psychological (personality), it may be worthwhile to figure out what humanity has already dug up over the many years of unofficial existence of psychology and to build a model that will lead to the desired solution, although, of course, in fact, I am sure the solution will be somewhere at the junction.

The main thing here seems to me is the fact that I have not met any fundamental objections to the possibility of creating an artificial personality. The existence of us as individuals is not due to the fact that we are embodied in matter, although it is strongly conditioned by the laws of the organization of matter, there is no reason that these influences could not be modeled in a computer system. The question remains how to realize cultural influence, we also need to talk about it.

When I began to learn and understand what people learned in psychology, I came to a silent horror. I came across an infinite number of theories, approaches and techniques that argued with each other, and each of them had no way to substantiate their point of view once and for all, because the experiment itself, a key element of classical science, was easily subject to violations. . This leads to the fact that people even quite often dispute the very meaning of the existence of such a science as psychology.

Reading Habr, I repeatedly stumbled upon the fact that people do not distinguish their everyday psychology experience from its scientific understanding, often speaking utter nonsense about basic concepts, in relation to which there is just some agreement in the scientific world. Conversely, it seems to me that in psychology there is a catastrophic lack of programmers who would not allow expressing themselves so vaguely and would find a way to operationalize and formalize concepts.

Therefore, I thought it would be great to create such a cycle of articles in which the habrasoobshchestvo could get acquainted with various aspects of psychological knowledge related to a specific goal, the creation of an artificial personality, and, possibly, would later lead some of them to psychology in order to shake up this science and bring about further growth in it. Of course, this is all my personal choice, but there is always the opportunity to see what is next.

I am also sure that expanding the range of knowledge in the field of theoretical psychology will give them additional opportunities to work on such areas of IT as artificial intelligence, creation of recommendation systems and game development.

I plan to write articles on the following topics (not necessarily in this order):
- Consideration of the most frequent disputes about psychology - psychology is not a science, which, in fact, studies psychology, typical misconceptions about the human psyche (psychophysiological problem of psychology, unity of consciousness and activity) - I would like to minimize typical disputes about psychology.

- The existing definitions of the life and existence of the psyche (Bauer, Leontiev) - without criteria for what one wants to receive, it is impossible to begin a modeling experiment. The conditioning of the development of matter into living mental forms by the laws of the physical world (Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction, elements of embryology).

“Vygotsky’s cultural-historical psychology — this theory is important to me primarily because it somehow unifies the existing psychological theories, and at the same time, due to its similarity to synergetic constructions, it seems to be subject to mathematical modeling.

“The theory of Leontiev’s activity is, in my opinion, a very formal attempt to model human activity; it seems to me that it can be easily applied to simulate various kinds of intelligent systems. In my last project, we finally came up with something similar, creating a recommendation system.

I would be happy to receive feedback, reasoned criticism of the approach to the problem of artificial intelligence, and maybe there are some other important topics, articles on which it would be interesting to read to masters from a person who recently plunged into psychology.