AI and the transcendence of true autonomy

Abstract

For more than sixty years, the "Holy Grail" of computer science has been to build an intelligent, autonomous system, one that is self-aware and capable of rational thought. The founders of Artificial Intelligence recently gave a grim assessment of their field: AI and neuroscience are fixated on the details of implementation, without a fundamental architecture in sight.(1) No one has ever articulated the design for an autonomous system, so how can one be built? Modern AI/AGI efforts attempt to achieve this goal through elaborate rules-based computation and biology-inspired computing topologies, while actively ignoring the need for a fundamental architecture. This publication introduces a novel architecture and fundamental operating theory behind true autonomy, breaking with the standard principles of AI the very principles that have kept AI from achieving its own goals.