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Apply rich psychological terms in AI with care

Nature Machine Intelligence volume 1, pages 165–167 (2019)Cite this article

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There is much to be gained from interdisciplinary efforts to tackle complex psychological notions such as ‘theory of mind’. However, careful and consistent communication is essential when comparing artificial and biological intelligence, say Henry Shevlin and Marta Halina.

Such use of psychological terms in AI research may be in many cases justified and unproblematic. Some terms with both narrow computational and psychological meanings, such as memory and reinforcement, have clearly distinct histories in psychology and AI and their senses are unlikely to be confused. Others such as learning and behaviour straddle psychology and AI, but are broad enough that there is little reason to quibble with their use to describe machine capacities. However, we argue here that there is a third kind of more robustly psychological concepts — including notions like awareness, perception, agency and theory of mind (ToM) — that have rich and complex histories in cognitive science. We suggest that these terms — which we call rich psychological concepts — require greater caution when employed to describe the capabilities of machine intelligence.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Henry Shevlin & Marta Halina

  2. Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Henry Shevlin & Marta Halina

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  1. Henry Shevlin
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  2. Marta Halina
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Correspondence to Henry Shevlin.

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Shevlin, H., Halina, M. Apply rich psychological terms in AI with care. Nat Mach Intell 1, 165–167 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-019-0039-y

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