The Basic Ideas of WBAI

2017.03.14

WBAI has been promoting R&D on the WBA approach to create a human-like AGI by learning from the architecture of the entire brain for the benefit of the public as a non-profit organization.  Since we set our vision as ‘to create a world in which AI exists in harmony with humanity’ at the WBA Symposium of last spring, we have been discussing how we could make advances toward its realization while taking advantage of WBA in the rapid advancement of AI.

Here, we announce that we have set our basic ideas by adding the mission and values to the vision to be realized.

The Basic Ideas of WBAI

  • Our vision is to create a world in which AI exists in harmony with humanity.
  • Our mission is to promote the open development of Whole Brain Architecture.
    • In order to make human-friendly artificial general intelligence a public good for all of mankind, we seek to continually expand open, collaborative efforts to develop AI based on an architecture modeled after the brain.
  • Our values are Study, Imagine and Build.
    • Study: Deepen and spread our expertise.
    • Imagine: Broaden our views through public dialogue.
    • Build: Create AGI through open collaboration.

The following are important for the newly set mission and values from the viewpoint of the construction of AGI:

  1. The more advanced and complex AI becomes , the more AI should become human-friendly or congenial with humans in its behavior and values in order for better co-existence with us.  For this to be achieved, it would be a valid approach to make AI having architecture similar to that of our brain.
  2. For benefits from advanced AI to be immense, it should not belong to particular organizations, but become a public good for all of mankind. We seek to realize that goal by promoting the joint development of advanced AI on brain architecture from a public standpoint.
  3. The earliest human-level AI should have the characteristics in 1 and 2 for the realization of our vision.  Development on brain architecture will facilitate it from the following technical points:
    1. The brain architecture is the only existing general intelligence and will be a platform developers could agree on, where collaborative development could be accelerated by technical integration (it would be more efficient than investing in multiple candidate architectures for various kinds of AGI).
    2. It will be possible to obtain clues to solve technical gridlocks from the brain.

We anticipate cooperation with those who agree with our ideas.

The Whole Brain Architecture Initiative, the NPO