Roots and Requirements for Collaborative AI

The vision of AI collaborators has long been a staple of science fiction, where artificial agents understand nuances of collaboration and human communication. They bring advantages to their human collaborators and teams by contributing their special talents. Government advisory groups and leaders in AI have advocated for years that AIs should be human compatible and be capable of effective collaboration. Nonetheless, robust AIs that can collaborate like talented people remain out of reach. This position paper draws on a cognitive analysis of what effective and robust collaboration requires of human and artificial agents. It sketches a history of public and AI visions for artificial collaborators, starting with early visions of intelligence augmentation (IA) and artificial intelligence (AI). It is intended as motivation and context for a second position paper on collaborative AI (Stefik & Price, 2023). The second paper reviews the multi-disciplinary state-of-the-art and proposes a roadmap for bootstrapping collaborative AIs.