Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures (2012) 1, 100 107

Available at www.sciencedirect.com

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/bica

INVITED ARTICLE

On a roadmap for the BICA Challenge

Alexei V. Samsonovich

Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive MS 2A1, Fairfax, VA 22030-4444, USA

Received 26 May 2012; accepted 29 May 2012

KEYWORDS Abstract
Human-level AI; The BICA Challenge is the challenge to create a general-purpose, real-life computational equiv-
Cognitive architectures;
alent of the human mind using an approach based on biologically inspired cognitive architec-
Turing test;
tures (BICA). To solve it, we need to understand at a computational level how natural
Newell list;
Critical mass intelligent systems develop their cognitive, metacognitive and learning functions. The solution
is expected to lead us to a breakthrough to intelligent agents integrated into the human society
as its members. This outcome has the potential to solve many problems of the modern world.
The article starts from the roadmap proposed by Dr. James Albus for a national program unify-
ing artificial intelligence, neuroscience and cognitive science. The BICA Challenge is introduced
in this context as a waypoint on the expanded roadmap. The gap between the state of the art
and challenge demands is analyzed. Specific problems and barriers are identified, an approach
to overcoming them is proposed, and an ultimate practical criterion for success is formulated.
It is estimated that the BICA Challenge can be solved within a decade.
2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Introduction: The BICA Challenge
The goal of the field of artificial intelligence at its onset was
to create a general-purpose computational equivalent of
human intelligence. The same challenge remains to be the
greatest challenge today, while the criteria for reaching it
continue to be analyzed, criticized and re-defined (Adams
et al., 2011; Anderson & Lebiere, 2003; Korukonda, 2003;
McCarthy, Minsky, Rochester, & Shannon, 1955; Newell,
1990; Turing, 1950). On the one hand, computational pow-
ers available today are approaching or already at the level
of the human brain, if measured by the number of principal
computing elements and operations per second. On the
E-mail addresses: alexei@bicasociety.org, samsonovich@cox.net
other hand, computers, no matter how big or how small,
are still generally clueless and require human assistance at
every step beyond programmed behavior. While many nar-
row superhuman capabilities have been achieved in artificial
intelligence, the general compatibility of artificial agents
with the human society remains well below the human
level.
A new powerful approach emerged recently in the fields
of cognitive modeling and artificial intelligence: biologically
inspired cognitive architectures (BICA: e.g., Samsonovich,
2010a). A cognitive architecture is a computational frame-
work for designing intelligent agents (Gray, 2007; Newell,
1990), and we call it biologically inspired when it aims
to reproduce functional properties of the human mind (of
course, cognitive architectures can be called biologically

2212-683X/$ - see front matter 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bica.2012.05.002
On a roadmap for the BICA Challenge
inspired for other reasons as well: e.g., when they mimic
structures, functions and/or dynamics of the brain). New
element added with the concept of BICA to the original arti-
ficial intelligence challenge is in the focus on internal mech-
anisms of the human mind, which extends the challenge
beyond the field of artificial intelligence. It is also believed
that BICA is the key to its solution, hence the name BICA
Challenge (Chella, Lebiere, Noelle, & Samsonovich, 2011).
The BICA Challenge can be formulated as the challenge
to create a general-purpose, real-life computational equiv-
alent of the human mind. To solve it, we need to understand
at a computational level how natural intelligent systems de-
velop their cognitive, metacognitive and learning functions.
A solution to the challenge would be an intelligent agent (a
cognitive architecture) that implements a functional replica
of the essential human mind, and therefore can be per-
ceived by humans as a mind of a human kind, can learn from
humans as a student, can become a useful member of a
team as a collaborator, and more generally, can be a mem-
ber of the human society who enjoys human rights and takes
human responsibilities. With its links to social, legal, ethi-
cal, philosophical, engineering, technological, and other as-
pects, the BICA Challenge emerges as a new all-scientific
mainstream challenge of our time that deserves a multi-na-
tional program, as explained below.
The Jim Albus legacy
On April 17, 2011, the BICA community lost its great leader:
Dr. James S. Albus. His work on computational theory of
mind (Albus, 2008; Albus & Meystel, 2002) is continuously
guiding us in our everyday scientific research. Among his
many life accomplishments is the Decade of the Mind
(DoM) initiative (Albus et al. 2007): a proposal for a multibil-
lion national program with the potential to create human-
level intelligent agents broadly integrated into the human
society within a decade, altering the look and feel of the hu-
man civilization as we know it.
Why do we need human-level intelligent agents? The very
possibility may sound frightening (Kurzweil, 2005; Vinge,
2008), but what many people are missing is its positive va-
lue. Remarkably, the DoM initiative was proposed by Jim Al-
bus at the time of a global economic crisis. In the historical
moment we are living, many countries are experiencing the
biggest social and economical crisis after World War II. Peo-
ple become poor and desperate. The number of suicides is
growing every day, the fight for basic rights, revolutionary
movements and wars are uprising in many nations. In this
situation we cannot limit our attention to sci-fi and mythical
threats associated with the future artificial intelligence. In-
stead, we should take seriously the opportunity to create
new artificial intelligence as a universal remedy against
imminent threats and a radical solution to many problems
of the society. Jim Albus had a great social conscience
regarding this point. He was writing about a future world,
where everybody enjoys prosperity and economic justice
(Albus 2011). He argued that human-level artificial intelli-
gence can help us to achieve this dream, and explained
how this would happen. This is why we need the DoM and re-
lated initiatives, and this is why the overarching goal and a
roadmap to it need to be studied and worked out. Those
101
who find this argument a poor motivation are referred to
the works of Jim Albus (2008, 2011). This article is not about
motivation: it addresses the questions what and how.
Jim Albus provided the ideological basis for many revolu-
tionary DARPA programs, including the BICA Program
(20052006). Later he became an active Founding Member
of the BICA Society. In 2010 at the Annual BICA Society
meeting he led a discussion on a roadmap to human-level
artificial intelligence, following his keynote (the video is
available at http://www.bicasociety.org/videos). The par-
ticular version of his draft of the roadmap to human-level
artificial intelligence (Table 1) is extracted from his slides.
The left column is the Draft of the Plan proposed by
Jim Albus, and the right column expands this plan into spe-
cific goals.
The overarching goal put forward by Jim Albus is to make
a breakthrough to human-level artificial intelligence within
a decade, using an approach centered on the human mind.
Based on Table 1, the five components of the plan proposed
by Jim Albus can be characterized as: (i) reverse-engineer-
ing of the brain, (ii) a scientific theory of mind, (iii) a ladder
of practical steps to integration of human-level artificial
intelligence into the society, (iv) metrics and tests for intel-
ligence and biological fidelity, and (v) related social, ethi-
cal, legal and philosophical issues.
Jim Albus saw the key to solution in development of a com-
putational theory of mind (ii). This theory should allow for an
implementation of the functionality of the human mind at a
higher level of abstraction than the level of synapses, ion
channels, even neurons. Yet, the implementation should be
sufficiently detailed to capture the specifics of human cogni-
tion. This level of modeling corresponds to the level of BICA.
Accordingly, the critical point of Table 1 is 1b: a minimal sci-
entific theory of mind implemented as a BICA that would suf-
fice for a breakthrough to human-level intelligent agents.
Therefore, in this interpretation, the BICA Challenge is not
the ultimate goal by itself, but a critical waypoint on the
roadmap to a human-level artificial intelligence.
Expanding the roadmap
The purpose of this section is to provide a further under-
standing of the roadmap, together with the BICA Challenge
and the ultimate overarching goal in its context. A possible
view of the essential part of the roadmap is represented in
Fig. 1. Elements of Fig. 1 are listed alphabetically with
explanations below (the list extends the figure caption and
is not intended as a glossary of terms).
Accept as a partner: Human team members need to be
ready to accept a virtual agent as an equal team mem-
ber, which includes establishing relations of trust and
mutual understanding, sharing responsibilities and rely-
ing on the agent performance.
Agent side: Human-readiness requirements for the
human-compatible BICA agent.
Attention, awareness, intentionality: In order to be
believable in behavior, the agent needs to demonstrate
sensible voluntary attention control, awareness of the
situation, and self-consistent, intentional voluntary
behavior.
102 A.V. Samsonovich

Table 1 The Roadmap proposed by Jim Albus.

Plan
1. Theory and fundamental science
2. Experimental test environment
3. Practical applications
4. Performance metrics
5. Social, ethical, and legal issues
Goals
(a) To develop theoretical models of the brain that describe the inputs and outputs of all of
the major neural modules and systems of the brain, and specify the functional
transformations that take place therein
(b) To develop computational models of the mind that generate the functional equivalent
of the phenomena of perception, cognition, intention, imagination, memory, learning,
feeling, emotion, and behaviors of manipulation, locomotion, and language
(a) To develop experimental models of the brain that mimic the inputs and outputs
of functional modules in the brain, and mimic the functional transformations that take
place therein.
(b) To demonstrate the performance of brain models in controlling systems applied to
real-world tasks of locomotion, manipulation, imagination, reasoning, and natural
language conversation.
To apply intelligent systems technology to social and economic problems such as:
(a) Manufacturing autos, appliances, planes, drugs, textiles
(b) Construction roads, bridges, homes, businesses, factories
(c) Transportation trucks, cars, buses, planes, trains
(d) Agriculture planting, harvesting, tending, aquaculture
(e) Mining and drilling digging, hauling, undersea ops
(f) Recycling and environmental restoration
(g) Education and entertainment
(h) Aids to handicapped and elderly
(i) Medical and nursing care
(a) To develop metrics and methods for verifying, validating, and evaluating models
of mind and brain
(b) To develop metrics and methods for measuring the performance of intelligent
machines and systems
(a) To confront the social, ethical, legal, and philosophical issues related to investigating
the human mind, including the implications for mental health
(b) To provide a forum for public debate of the potential costs, risks, and benefits
of understanding the mind, including possible religious and civil liberties objections
(c) To address issues of unemployment, economic growth, and environmental implications
of intelligent machines

Believable behavior: The agent needs to be believable in
its behavior (behave like a conscious being), transparent
and trustworthy. Specifically, for this purpose the agent
should demonstrate voluntary control of attention and
action, motivation, intentionality, goal-setting abilities,
emotional intelligence, and self-regulation.
BICA Challenge: A human-level artificial team member
implemented as a general-purpose computational equiv-
alent of the human mind (e.g., as a virtual agent).
Co-presence: The agent should induce in human partners
a sense of its co-presence, or third-person presence; in
other words, an intuitive belief that the agent is some-
body intelligent who is present here.
Creativity: The agent must be capable of design, gener-
ation and evaluation of new concepts, rules, strategies,
hypotheses, behaviors, goals, etc.
Domain expert: Expert-level intelligence in a specific
domain. The BICA agent needs to provide intelligent
capabilities at an expert level in its domain of expertise.
Emotional intelligence: The agent needs to be able to
recognize emotional motivations in human behavior,
understand human emotions, reason in terms of emo-
tions, and generate appropriate behavioral emotional
reactions at a human level, involving basic and com-
plex/social emotions.
Episodic memory: The agent needs to have advanced,
human-level episodic memory, both retrospective
(memory for past experiences) and prospective (memory
for plans, goals, dreams, values, imagined possibilities,
etc.).
General knowledge: The agent needs to have human-
level general knowledge of facts about the world, includ-
ing the commonsense knowledge.
Goal setting and intentionality: The agent needs to pos-
sess teleological capabilities, as to be able to develop
and select new personal goals, also to form a personal
system of values, and to generate plans and intentions
consistent with its goals and values.
Human side: Agent-readiness conditions that must be
met in the human society for the BICA Solution to be
achieved.
Human-compatible: The BICA agent needs to be compat-
ible with humans as a team member and as a society
member.
Human-extending: The agents must be active carriers of
the human mentality, human spirit, human values,
human culture, and in a remote future human minds
themselves.
Imagery: The agent must be capable of mental simula-
tions of possible worlds and scenarios using multiple
modalities.
Learner critical mass: The agent should possess the
critical mass of a universal human-level learner
(Samsonovich, 2007, 2010b), meaning that it should be
On a roadmap for the BICA Challenge
Fig. 1 A possible view of a partially expanded, extended roadmap. Elements are explained in the list in text. Fat ovals show
critical waypoints. Ovals filled with dots represent partially available capabilities. Arrows represent dependencies. The BICA
Challenge is an intermediate critical waypoint on the roadmap.
able to learn what a human student can learn under
equivalent conditions from a given new domain.
Metacognitive abilities: The agent needs to possess
human-level metacognitive abilities, including episodic
memory, Theory of Mind, self-regulation, complex and
social emotions, the ability to generate goals, etc.
Self-regulation: This term is understood here in the
sense of educational science (Zimmerman, 2008), where
it applies to self-regulated learning, self-regulated prob-
lem solving, etc. Elements of self-regulation include self-
awareness, self-analysis, self-rewarding, self-monitor-
ing, self-instructing, self-motivation, self-observation,
self-control, self-judgment, self-reaction, self-imagery,
self-experimentation, self-attribution of outcomes,
self-adaptation, etc.
Self-sustainable: The new society component as a whole
(including humans in the loop) should be able to take
care of its own persistence and growth, including devel-
opment, production, and market, in a way that ensures
an open-ended scenario of its evolution and integration
into the society.
Sensemaking: The agent should demonstrate common-
sense awareness of the situation, which involves the abil-
ity to put together disparate, multimodal, possibly noisy
and limited sensory inputs and general knowledge to
form a clear understanding of the gist and goals in the
current situation.
103
Social and communicational capabilities: The agent
needs to be human-level socially-intelligent, friendly
and cooperative with humans, needs to be able to com-
municate freely using natural language and other means
(e.g., gestures) at a level that would allow it to establish
relationships of mutual understanding and trust.
Social basis: The society needs to provide a basis for the
new hybrid teams (humans plus virtual agents), including
the necessary policies for virtual agents as team mem-
bers, and funds.
Society component: A part of the human society repre-
sented by artificial intelligent agents, understood as
the ultimate overarching goal (discussed in the last
section).
Theory of mind: The agent needs to possess an
advanced, human-level Theory of Mind, i.e., be able to
simulate human minds in various situations. This notion
extends beyond the mere representation of states of
beliefs, desires and goals of others.
The BICA Challenge (Fig. 1) is, in essence, interpretable
as the challenge to have virtual agents accepted by the soci-
ety as its useful members and treated on equal with human
members of the society, initially within limited domains,
teams and environments. At the point when the challenge
will be solved, large investments and rapid progress in the
field can be expected, that will result in rapid development
104
of the new component of the society. Examples of agent do-
mains of expertise may include, in addition to Table 1 item
3, the following examples: personal computer assistant,
computer administrator, IT specialist, web master, com-
puter programmer, personal secretary, accountant, graphic
designer, computer modeler, personal tutor, videogame
partner, synthetic character virtual actor or talk show
host, storyteller, virtual babysitter, business manager,
nightwatch, virtual correspondent, research assistant, re-
search advisor, teaching assistant, grader, interviewer, vir-
tual salesman, travel agent, receptionist, architect, artist,
etc. In other words, virtual agents should be able to do al-
most everything that people do on computers, and more.
Elements of the challenge include, on the agent side, a
minimal agency that is sufficient to provide a solution to
the challenge. In other words, the agents must be hu-
man-ready, which implies achievement of the following
conditions.
(a) Critical mass of a universal human-level learner: i.e.,
the ability to grow naturally to a human level of intel-
ligence, virtually in any practically interesting domain
of human intellectual expertise. Subgoals include: (i)
identifying the critical mass; (ii) designing a critical
mass; and (iii) implementing a critical mass.
(b) A sense of co-presence associated with the agent,
resulting from (i) human-like common sense; (ii)
believable autonomous behavior; (iii) human-like
metacognitive abilities, including episodic memory;
(iv) human-like value system and personality (not
shown in Fig. 1).
(c) Human compatibility in collaborative work (the ability
to work productively with human partners), which
includes (a) and (b) and implies in particular that
the agent (i) is capable of independent decision mak-
ing, while being subordinate to humans; (ii) is able to
communicate using natural language as well as other
means; and (iii) can respond on the human time scale.
On the human side, the challenge includes reaching,
e.g., the following conditions.
(a) The society is taking the BICA Challenge seriously, as a
top-priority goal, with an understanding of the value
of solving the challenge. The society needs to create
and fund a major (inter)national program to solve
the challenge.
(b) Human team members are ready to accept new arti-
facts as teammates treated on equal with human
team members: (i) overcoming social and psychologi-
cal barriers; (ii) giving legal rights and responsibilities
to new artifacts; (iii) creating new policies and initia-
tives (financial, infrastructural, administrative) for
hybrid (human-artifact) units at all social levels, to
support the emergence, development and prolifera-
tion of hybrid units in military, business, industrial,
educational and research institutions, etc.
There are currently a number of research programs around
the world that explicitly or implicitly address the BICA Chal-
lenge. Yet, despite impressive successes and growing interest
in BICA, wide gaps continue to separate different approaches
A.V. Samsonovich
from each other and from solutions found in biology. Dis-
jointed scientific communities may speak different languages
and pursue independent, limited goals. In this situation,
broadly advertised public discussions of the overarching BICA
Challenge should play an integrating role. The BICA Society
is planning to continue these discussions on Videopanels
(http://www.bicasociety.org/vp) and on conference venues.
The list of recent and ongoing mainstream research pro-
jects and initiatives in computer science and technology,
cognitive science and neuroscience that directly or indi-
rectly address the BICA Challenge is quite long and includes
the following examples:
 The Blue Brain Project
 The Human Brain Project
 US Army Research Lab Robotics Collaborative Technol-
ogy Alliance
 DARPA SyNAPSE
 DARPA Bootstrapped Learning
 IARPA ICARUS
 EU FACETS
 EU POETICON
 EU Cognitive Systems and Robotics (ICT) Programme
 The beyond traditional CMOS computing challenge
 US DoM Initiative
 Convergent Science Network
 EUCOG
 Robot Companions for Citizens
 Brains in Silicon
 Neuro-Bio-Inspired Systems (NBIS)
 EU HUMANOBS
Many necessary lower-level capabilities are already par-
tially available (ovals filled with dots in Fig. 1, while this
interpretation may be ambiguous) and other should become
available soon. Nevertheless, their current implementations
may not satisfy the needs of the challenge. A few examples
illustrating the gap between the state of the art and the
challenge demands are considered in the next section.
Challenge criteria vs. the state of the art
A general problem with neuroscience and cognitive psychol-
ogy in the context of the BICA Challenge consists in limita-
tions of their theoretical paradigms. E.g., system-level
computational neuroscience is stuck at the level of tradi-
tional connectionism for many decades. This level makes
it very difficult to describe sophisticated symbolic informa-
tion processing at a higher level of abstraction, that is typ-
ical for human cognition. While specific studies identify
neurons that may represent higher abstract concepts
(e.g., Rees, Kreiman, & Koch, 2002) and modeling ap-
proaches tackle separate elements, it was not possible so
far to build a computational model of a complete agent
(e.g., a complete virtual rat) of these elements described
at the neuronal level. At the same time, existing research
programs are currently pursuing this sort of a goal. It is also
unclear whether this solution would be necessary or a
much simpler solution can be found.
A similar connectionist paradigm also dominates a large
part of cognitive psychology for decades, resulting in
On a roadmap for the BICA Challenge
limitations in the field. As a consequence, experimental and
modeling studies are addressing isolated phenomena or lim-
ited aspects like cognitive biases, that together do not pro-
vide a complete picture of information processing in the
brain. Cognitive modeling goes beyond this level in building
complete cognitive architectures (Gray, 2007), yet in most
cases their implementations are limited to basic cognitive
functions and/or special cases and toy problems. Extensions
of the mainstream cognitive architectures that include fea-
tures like episodic memory, emotions, metacognition, self-
awareness, etc. appear to be limited, as illustrated by fol-
lowing examples.
Soar (Laird, Newell, & Rosenbloom, 1987) and ACT-R
(Anderson & Lebiere 1998) are the two most widely known
and used cognitive architectures. There were recently
numerous works on implementation and study of higher cog-
nitive functions in Soar and ACT-R, including emotional cog-
nition, episodic memory, imagery, metacognition, etc. It is
relatively easy to implement some aspect of a higher cogni-
tive feature in an architecture, but this does not necessarily
solve the problem. For example, the recently extended ver-
sion of Soar (Laird 2008; Mariner, Laird, & Lewis 2009)
implements an appraisal theory of Scherer in its Appraisal
Detector. A limitation here and in related works is that ap-
praisal is evaluated as one global characteristic of the situ-
ation of the agent: the model does not support several
active appraisals at the same time. In contrast, in human
cognition, emotional characteristics are attributed to virtu-
ally all individual elements of awareness at all levels, that
are processed in parallel. Other limitations are in the low le-
vel (missing complex emotions) and the limited usage
(mostly for reinforcement learning) of implemented
appraisals. While these are impressive works, there is still
a long way to go from here to the BICA Challenge.
The same work (Laird 2008) describes an implementation
of episodic memory in Soar as time-stamped stored snap-
shots of working memory contents, which appears to be
easy from the authors point of view. Episodic memory of metacognition (Cox & Raja, 2011) as well as many other
is not easy in biology, where it combines phenomena of
(re)consolidation, the multiple trace formation (Nadel &
Moscovitch, 1997), prospective memory creation, traces of
imagery, Theory-of-Mind thinking and the like (Nadel &
Hardt, 2011). While the book of Tulving (1983) is cited, in
Tulvings view, episodic memory involves the notion of the
self in the past, and its retrieval is compared to a mental
time travel of the self. Unfortunately, there is no concept
of self in Soar or in ACT-R.
One evidence of episodic memory in humans is that in
many cases a person would not say or do the same thing
twice: e.g., would not take a medication 5 min after it
was taken. Also, a human episodic memory by definition is
always created by one-time learning from a single episode
of experience. In contrast, the usage of episodic memory
in Soar (Gorski & laird, 2011; Laird, 2008) and in related
works occurs in paradigms in which a repetition of previ-
ously successful action is considered a success of learning,
and successful learning typically takes not one, but hun-
dreds or thousands of experienced episodes. This way of
usage makes the boundary between episodic and semantic
memory in computer science unclear. At the same time,
episodic memory in ACT-R is not available even at this level
(Gorski et al., 2011). In general, episodic memory in
105
computer science is frequently confused with reference
memory, which in psychology belongs to the category of
semantic memory (Nadel & Hardt, 2011): this is an example
of communities speaking different languages.
The big problem with mainstream cognitive architectures
is, however, not in these details and limitations, which in
principle one can fix. The problem is that it takes a huge
amount of human labor to implement any new feature in
these architectures, which ideally at some point should be
done by agents themselves. Typically in cognitive modeling
and in artificial intelligence, a system can do only the kind
of learning for which it was designed, and it takes more
and more sophisticated designs to increase learning capabil-
ities. Learning architectures that once were claimed to be
universal learners in fact have severe limitations (e.g.,
Huffman & Laird, 1995). In contrast, the challenge of the
learner critical mass (Samsonovich, 2007, 2010b) requires
the opposite: finding a simplest possible design that enables
virtually unlimited learning without re-programming. It is
possible to imagine that the nearest practical solution of
this sort will be found as a humongous structure in Soar or
ACT-R. More likely, however, alternative principles will be
utilized to achieve general human-level learning capabilities
with a relatively simple design.
Similarly, models of complex and social emotions that
get implemented computationally are currently designed
manually (e.g., Steunebrink, Dastani, & Meyer, 2007). It
seems that a true explanatory theory of emotions should
provide a natural mechanism for the emergence of complex
emotions starting from a minimal emotional embryo, in-
stead of offering modelers to design representations of
complex emotions manually in each special case, using their
intuition or available phenomenological models. Here one
simple and universal solution should be valued more than
hundreds of labor-consuming, detailed case-specific model
implementations.
The situation looks similar in modeling of various forms
elements of Fig. 1. The bottom line here is that there ap-
pears to be a general barrier in virtually every dimension
of the roadmap when researchers attempt to move toward
the BICA Challenge from more traditional research para-
digms. The nature of it was captured a long time ago by
John von Neumann: If you will tell me precisely what it
is that a machine cannot do, then I can always make a ma-
chine which will do just that. There always will be found
an efficient traditional special-case solution for a given
problem, and yet the problem is to find one general BICA
solution for all cases. This problem will never be solved if
instead of trying to solve it we will continue looking for lo-
cal minima: most efficient traditional case-based solu-
tions, adding them together step by step. Instead of
incremental accumulation and integration of new capabili-
ties, which has been a tradition in artificial intelligence
for decades, a simple and universal model is needed that
can enable virtually unlimited, quasi-autonomous cognitive
growth: possibly with human instruction and scaffolding,
but without the need for a programmer intervention, and
hopefully based on BICA rather than on genetic algorithms.
It appears that this step can be accomplished if we take the
logic of BICA to a meta-level and allow the architecture to
construct itself (Samsonovich, 2009).
106
Concluding remarks: An ultimate criterion for
success
We live in a very special time, when people can create what
they could only dream of creating in the past (Nietzsche,
1885/1993, Zarathustras Prologue) and what might be a
useless exercise to re-create in the future. This is the possi-
bility to create something similar to us, something that can
extend the human mind and spirit beyond the human body
and beyond the human imagination. And yet a problem is to
understand precisely what is that we want to create, before
we may know how. Many definitions, tests, concepts and cri-
teria were proposed through decades and continue to be de-
signed today (Adams et al., 2011; Anderson & Lebiere, 2003;
McCarthy et al., 1955; Newell, 1990; Turing, 1950). The old-
est of them remains to be the most popular, despite a grow-
ing consensus that it is not good (Korukonda, 2003). Does
the idea of a big breakthrough in artificial intelligence make
sense at all? How long before it may happen? Here is one
possible view.
The ultimate, overarching goal, to which the BICA Chal-
lenge is only a step, was described above as a situation in
the world when an essential component of the human soci-
ety will emerge, represented by human-like intelligent
agents integrated into human teams. This will be not a com-
ponent of the infrastructure of the human civilization, and
not a new category of tools and technology, because these
agents will have rights and responsibilities of society mem-
bers. At the same time, they should be a subordinate exten-
sion of the human society, not an alternative to us. This
extension will help people to solve many problems of the
human civilization, and in general will make our world a
better place for us. Created initially as virtual intelligent
agents, they will at some point acquire physical embodi-
ment. This goal includes three main conditions. The intelli-
gent agents must be: (1) human-compatible and useful as
society members, (2) self-sustainable, and (3) human-
extending. These conditions are explained again below.
(1) Human-compatible and useful as society members
means, on the one hand, human-level generally-intel-
ligent, capable of communication and learning, and
generally useful as experts and workers to humans,
and on the other hand, believable, transparent and
trustworthy, as judged by humans.
(2) Self-sustainable means that the new component as
a whole (including humans in the loop) should be able
to take care of its own persistence and growth,
including development, production, and market, in a
way that ensures an open-ended scenario of its evolu-
tion and integration into the society.
(3) Human-extending means that the agents must be
active carriers of the human mentality, human spirit,
human values, human culture, and possibly, in a
remote future human minds themselves.
It remains to say that these three conditions together can
be taken instead of the Turing test as a practical criterion
for achieving a true human-level artificial intelligence. In
other words, they constitute the ultimate goal for our imag-
inable future and the ultimate practical success criterion at
A.V. Samsonovich
the same time. Many science-fiction movies and related
modern writings frame future artificial intelligence as a po-
tential enemy of the mankind. Based on the above, its
anticipated role is quite opposite: a savior, a remedy against
imminent threats, and a radical solution to human
problems.
How long would it take? My guess is that the step from
the first BICA Challenge solution to the Society Component
may be fast it could take less than a year, and may indeed
look like an explosion. What happens next depends on the
organization of the process. First steps through the roadmap
(Fig. 1) starting from the bottom are happening as we speak.
Solving the BICA Challenge, even within a limited domain, is
the hardest part of the path. Nevertheless, if taken seri-
ously, it may take only about a decade, as estimated by
Jim Albus. The bottom line: it can be done.
Meanwhile, the battle of man and machine is unfolding
today: not as a battle of physical or virtual bodies, but as
a battle of mentalities, ideas and paradigms. People be-
come dependent in their thinking on smart electronic re-
sources and intelligent artifacts, while those resources
and artifacts acquire features of the human mind. What
we need and hopefully will find in future artificial intelli-
gence is not an invisible enemy that tacitly takes control
over our minds, but a continuation of the human spirit,
ideas and values. There should be no doubt that machines
will take larger and larger part in the ordinary human life.
What is uncertain is whether those machines will eventually
become humans and our friends or will humans turn into
machine parts until they become obsolete. This is for us
to decide in our lifetime.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to my friends and colleagues as Directors of
the BICA Society: Drs. Kamilla R. Johannsdottir and Antonio
Chella, for their useful comments on the manuscript that
helped me to improve it. My greatest thanks go to Dr. James
S. Albus, with whom I had interactions during the last years
of his life, primarily in the context of the DARPA BICA Pro-
gram, the Decade of the Mind initiative, and many initia-
tives of the BICA Society. I remember Jim as a visionary
and a great teacher, whose ideas always inspired me to
think about the future of the human civilization; as a good
friend, whose positive energy and creative thinking contin-
uously empowered everybody who was in touch with him,
and I was lucky to be among those.
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