Counterfactual Assessment and Valuation for Awareness Architecture

Introduction

The Counterfactual Assessment and Valuation for Awareness Architecture (CAVAA) project proposes that awareness serves survival in a world governed by hidden states. This awareness is crucial for dealing with the invisible, from unexplored environments to social interactions that depend on the internal states of agents and moral norms.

Concept of Awareness

Awareness reflects a virtual world, a hybrid of perceptual evidence, memory states, and inferred unobservables, extended in space and time. The CAVAA project aims to realize a theory of awareness instantiated as an integrated computational architecture and its components to explain awareness in biological systems and engineer it in technological ones.

Computational Components

The project will realize underlying computational components of:

1. Perception
2. Memory
3. Virtualization
4. Simulation
5. Integration

These components will be embodied in robots and artificial agents, validated across a range of use cases involving the interaction between multiple humans and artificial agents. This will be done using accepted measures and behavioral correlates of awareness.

Use Cases

Use cases will address:

• Robot foraging
• Social robotics
• Computer game benchmarks
• Human-generated decision trees in a health coach

These benchmarks will focus on resolving trade-offs, such as between search efficiency and robustness, and assess the acceptance of human users of aware technology.

Ethics Framework

CAVAA's awareness engineering is accompanied by an ethics framework towards human users and aware artifacts in the broader spectrum of trustworthy AI. This framework considers:

• Shared ontologies
• Intention complementarity
• Behavioral matching
• Empathy
• Relevance of outcomes
• Reciprocity
• Counterfactuals and projections towards new future scenarios
• Prediction of the impact of choices

User Experience

CAVAA will deliver a better user experience because of its explainability, adaptability, and legibility. The integrated framework redefines how we look at the relationship between humans, other species, and smart technologies because it makes the invisible visible.