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 assist their human partners and teams and contribute special talents. Government advisory groups and leaders in AI have advocated for years that AIs should be human compatible and effective collaborators. Nonetheless, robust AIs that collaborate like talented people remain out of reach. This position paper draws on psychology and social sciences for an analysis of what effective and robust collaboration requires. 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 that recommends how to bootstrap AIs and AI collaborators (Stefik & Price, 2023).