A Relational-Database Methodology for Incorporating Consciousness into AI Agents

Consciousness is key to Artificial General Intelligence. It is currently unclear what is consciousness and we expect that by the time it is understood, there will probably be millions of man-years invested in the development of AI agents. This paper addresses the following question. How should AI agents be engineered from now on, such that when it becomes clear how consciousness and subjective experiences are generated, the effort of endowing AI agents and robots existing at that time with consciousness is minimized. As far as we know this question has not been studied heretofore. The paper proposes a methodology and architecture that are based on evolving Probabilistic Relational Databases, and on stepwise progressive data fusion. The methodology and architecture are independent of what consciousness turns out to be, provided that it can be incorporated into AI agents.