Human & Intelligent Machines – Some thought on The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

This article is the result of a sudden inspiration. A kinda busy (but lazy) weekend and I decided to take some reading to relax. As I go with The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, I noticed some points very similar to what I’ve learnt in an old book of Artificial Intelligence:

• A matured person should be independent – an “intelligent” agent should be autonomous
• Interdependence is a higher form of independence, as in real world, people can have complex relationships – In a multi-agent system, an agent interacts with others to achieve its own goal, and still remains autonomous.
• Every human has a set of paradigms, or maps of this world, that governs the way he thinks and acts – an agent maintains a knowledge base of what it perceives and use that knowledge to make decision. Of course, neither humans nor agents are omniscient, and their knowledge may be far from truth.
• Given such imperfection, it’s important that we are able to learn from experiences. Humans possess self-awareness or the ability to think about our thought process. This explains why we can get rid of some habits or adopted new ones. In the same way, agents can be design to incorporate a self-study mechanism that helps them learn from failures and deal with uncertainty.

Ok! So…?

It seems that human and agent share a lot in common. After all, the ultimate goal of AI is to create intelligent machines that model human behaviors. How can that be possible if we don’t first understand our own reasoning process? Unsurprisingly AI has its root deep in philosophy and psychology, where the foundation of human mind theories were laid. Learning AI is therefore learning about ourself. Perhaps that’s what makes it such an interesting field to discover!

Reading The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is a quite refreshing experience as it reminds me of a familiar but often overlooked fact that people (or agents) tend to have very different views of a specific truth. It’s true that our number one problem is the way we see the problem. And to solve that requires a thorough approach, not a superficial change of attitude or behavior. Just as an agent’s inference algorithm becomes useless if it doesn’t know what it already knows, it’s only when we understand our own paradigm that we can make a true paradigm shift toward becoming highly effective people.

   * Recommend reading:

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen R. Covey)