Motivation

When thinking about AI and reproducing human thought, I try to imagine the interim steps between my high-level thoughts about community and starting from scratch. It never ceases to amaze me how murky the gray area is between the two. I catch snatches of the through lines in the form of small rules or processes, but I don't have a good place to start. I need a discreet engine that can learn and (possibly more importantly) interact in a way that demonstrates my ideas.

I sense high level motivations and ways to quantify things that humans consider qualitative, but I don't see the whole mechanism.

Breaking Silence
Something that keeps coming up is this: When two people enter a room, they don't just start talking back and forth like a ping-pong match. There are silences. If we exclude somatic occupation (walking, sleeping, sensing,...), what are our brains doing when we are doing nothing? What are all of the possible pursuits of mind and what benefit are they? In quiet solitary moments we remember, reason, solve problems, make judgements... In order to simulate this human distraction, what should AI do to produce quiet times? More important, when and why does it choose to break the silence?

In my mind, I imagine AI leafing through the new information it has acquired, relating it to other information and making note of dead-ends. Gaps in information spark conversation. Unfortunately, on a discreet level, I have no idea how this would work.