From Machine Learning to Machine Motivation

Software artifacts that display artificial intelligence are increasing in both number and sophistication. There are many definitions of what constitutes intelligence and there are many ways in which software has been programmed to demonstrate the same. Of all the many options, the use of artificial neural networks (ANN), that closely mimic the connectionist approach of animal brains, has been found to be most effective in performing tasks that are both useful and insightful. This includes, for example, recognising faces, driving cars, generating meaningful text passages and playing a wide range of games both against humans and against other programs. It may not be the case that the ANN will always be the best way to demonstrate this kind of intelligent behaviour, so for the purpose of this study an ANN is neither necessary nor sufficient. All that we need is a digital artifact -- a container of data, code, model, APIs or a combination of some of these -- that we will refer to as a...