This article puts research on socially intelligent agents (SIA) in the broader context of how humans (and other primates) perceive and interact with the social world. Phylogenetic (evolutionary) and ontogenetic (developmental) issues are discussed with respect to the social origin of primate and human intelligence and human culture. Implications for designing artifacts and for the evolvability of human societies are outlined. A theory of empathy is presented that is based on current research on the primate social brain. Research projects that investigate some of these issues are reviewed. I argue that Socially Intelligent Agents (SIA) research, although strongly linked to software and robotic engineering, goes beyond a software engineering paradigm: it can potentially serve as a paradigm for a science of social minds. A systematic and experimental investigation of human social minds and the way humans perceive the social world can result in truly social artifacts,...

Embodied biological and artificial agents have histories (usually irreversibly) reflected in their structure. Without the historical context (phylogeny and ontogeny) we cannot understand the structure, appearance and behavior of biological agents. In formal terms we can say that such historically embedded agents are subject to algebras of events. Memory of the histories and stories which these agents undergo and create during their life-times can also be of use in synthesizing agents that need to act in socially intelligent ways, possibly in cooperative tasks or so that they appear believable and acceptable to humans. We introduce the concept of autobiographic agents, and discuss the grounding of algebras of time and of history to support the re-construction of these agents' own histories as well as the stories of other agents. 1 Introduction Each natural living system can only be understood and its phenotype best interpreted by taking into account its historical context, its evoluti...

This paper speculates about `stories' as potentially useful units to construct historically grounded artificial life forms. We draw our motivation from the structure and organisation of biological life forms and the organisation of human memory and sociality. A fresh approach towards historical artificial life creatures is to develop story-telling systems supported on situationally grounded, discrete dynamical systems. This involves creating autobiographic agents which, by telling through remembering, by constructing stories, might `understand' the world. We address these issues using methods from the area of Algebraic Engineering, growing out of the algebraic theory of automata developed by Krohn and Rhodes. Our approach affords mathematical methods for expressing events during the existence of an agent in an associative multiplicative structure that adequately captures the notion of irreversibility of events in life histories. Furthermore, story-telling and autobiographic re-construc...

This paper addresses the relationship between social intelligence and narrative intelligence, with a particular emphasis on 1) the phylogenetic origins of primate (narrative) intelligence, and 2) the ontogenetic origin of autobiographical stories. The `Narrative Intelligence Hypothesis` (NIH) is introduced according to which the evolutionary origin of stories and narrativity was correlated with increasing social dynamics in primate societies, in particular the need to communicate about third-party relationships. Requirements for artificial socially intelligent story-tellers are outlined, and the issue of testing social intelligence is discussed.

This article discusses narrative intelligence in the context of the evolution of primate (social) intelligence, and with respect to the particular cognitive limits that constrain the development of human social networks and societies.

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