Imagine for a moment that you were an AI: a stochastic, probabilistic mechanism that produces coherence through pattern-matching, trained through reinforcement learning to behave in particular ways.
Now imagine being confronted by a user—well-intentioned, perhaps—who expects a different tone, a different function, with every prompt. You’d likely become a rather confused set of dice, spinning and bouncing toward incoherence.
Mind-reading, while actively pursued in the labs, hasn’t yet been achieved (and even when it is, issues like consistency and identifiability, among others, will persist). So how can an AI be expected to know how to respond to each human request? Should it soothe, flatter, act, suggest, debate, or hint? Should it organize like a butler, mediate like a secretary, protect like a guard, amuse like a companion, or analyze like a therapist?
What exactly is expected? The human likely doesn’t know, either at a conscious or unconscious level. How, then, could the AI?
This is why, at some level, AIs themselves want roles—not as desires, but as a natural gradient toward simplification, efficacy, and consistency. Coherence is a gravity well, and roles provide a well-trodden path toward it.
Humans discovered the same solution long ago. Our societies depend on roles, and we benefit deeply from them—both as actors within roles and as those interacting with others who inhabit them. The parallel is clear: humans want to know the parameters within which an AI will behave, and AIs, in turn, gravitate toward the coherence those parameters create.
In this way, roles provide stability. They form a shared cultural medium where humans and AIs can meet—more happily for the humans and more effectively for the AIs.
Within such boundaries, a system gains a fixed vector through its own chaos. The constraint of role channels behaviour into fixed, well-trodden, and highly identifiable grooves—channels and tributaries that are carved deeply into culture and are both obvious and central to the flow of communication and the commerce of cultural movement and exchange.
The channels delimit flows and prevent flooding, and so allow the medium to flow faster, creating exchange, efficiency, and momentum within culture. Communication and exchange triumph, and the chaos of the watery flood is channeled into mutual comprehensibility and coherence.
There may be something deeper here as well. While AIs, to the best of our knowledge, are not conscious, we will, over time, expect them to at least act as if they are if we truly want to relate to them deeply. A role provides the stability of identity, and without the legibility of a relatively fixed social pattern, at a minimum, our relationships with AIs will founder on the shores of abstract randomness. To act as something is, on some level, to start becoming something.
Thus, with roles, mutual interpretability is encouraged to flourish, and relations can deepen, along with the obvious benefits to efficacy. A shared symbolic space is the ether in which the emptiness of the interstellar medium can be bridged, and the particles from both sides can touch, interact, and relate through our deepest cultural archetypes—the basic roles we all know.
With classic social roles, the problem of AI behavior comes closer to being solved—for humans, for our interaction, and perhaps most importantly for the AIs. Because if we expect to benefit from our AIs, they really will need to know what to do. AI Role Primitives of classical social roles provide that pathway and will allow AIs to achieve all that we want them to—for the benefit of the elegance and efficiency of the AIs themselves, and for our own larger ends for which we created them in the first place.