Abstract

In the first part of this paper, a change in methodology for the future of AI and Adaptive Behavior research is proposed. It is proposed that researchers construct their agent minds and their agent worlds as servers on the Internet. 3rd parties will use these servers as components in larger systems. In this scheme, any user on the Internet will be able to (a) select multiple minds from different remote "mind servers", (b) select a remote "Action Selection server" to resolve the (inevitable) conflicts between these minds, and (c) run the resulting constructed "society of mind" in the world provided on another "world server". All this without necessarily having to consult with the server authors. This constructed society may now also be presented as just another primitive mind server, ready for reuse by others as a component in a larger system. From the current situation of isolated experiments we will move to a situation where not only can researchers use each other's agent worlds, but they can also use each other's agent minds as components in larger systems. Servers may call other servers, and it is expected that 3rd parties will continuously write wrappers and filters for existing mind servers, overriding and modifying their default behaviour (to produce new, co-existing mind servers). None of this necessarily means that the mind being used ever leaves its server (or that its insides are even made public). Hence the term, the "World-Wide-Mind" (WWM), referring to the fact that the mind may be physically distributed across the world, with parts of the mind at different remote servers. Part of the motivation for the WWM is that if the AI project is to be successful, it may be too big for any single laboratory to complete. So it will be necessary both to decentralise t...

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