Muddy Tasks and the Necessity of Autonomous Mental Development

Why do we need autonomous mental development (AMD) for intelligent robots? This paper introduces a concept called task muddiness which supports AMD as a necessity for higher intelligence. The task muddiness is meant to be inclusive and extendable in nature. The intelligence required to execute a task is measured by the composite muddiness of the task measured by a number of muddiness axes. The composite muddiness explains why many challenging tasks, such as the DARPA Grand Challenge 2005 (DARPA 2004), are muddy and why the autonomous mental development (AMD) approach is necessary for muddy tasks.