Conscious Robots.
The development of machine consciousness is a goal that is seen as the ultimate challenge in the field of artificial intelligence, according to Hod Lipson, the mechanical engineer in charge of the Creative Machines Lab at Columbia University. Consciousness is a controversial topic within the field of AI, and has been a contentious issue for a long time, with scientists divided on the possibility of creating machines that have consciousness on par with a human. Lipson believes that creating a machine that has consciousness on par with a human will be the most significant achievement in the field of AI and will eclipse everything else that has been done so far. It’s a goal that would undoubtedly change human life as we know it for good, he said.
However, one of the major issues that the industry faces when it comes to the question of consciousness is the fact that the concept itself doesn’t really have a firm definition, both in the field and beyond it. Philosophically, consciousness is vague and debatable, and scientifically, efforts to nail consciousness down to specific brain functions or otherwise signifiers tends to fall flat.
To deal with this issue, Lipson has his own definition of consciousness, that being the capacity to “imagine yourself in the future,” as explained by the New York Times. Thus, the engineer has focused a great deal of his career on working to build adaptable machines, with generalized intelligence that can learn to evolve by machine-learned natural selection, responding in kind to changing environments and errors or injury within the mechanical body. In other words: a machine with the ability to not only learn more and correct responsively, as machines do now, but a machine with the ability to imagine how it might be better, and evolving to suit that vision.
However, as consciousness is a subjective term, and has no set definition, it’s hard to assign any particular definition of it. Additionally, there is a tendency for humans to anthropomorphize things, which is present in the field of robotics and AI, where those building machines constantly project human features, both physical and intellectual, onto the devices they create. It’s always worth asking whether those machines actually possess the qualities that researchers like Lipson imagine they will one day possess or whether scientists, as a result of their own human urges, are projecting humanity, nature, consciousness or whatever you want to call it onto not conscious machines, reflecting back what they hope to see, rather than what is.
Read more: https://futurism.com/scientists-actively-trying-to-build-conscious-robots
