Consciousness, Authenticity, and Transcendence of Social Robots

Abstract

Some years ago when I was in Japan, I was having dinner with Hiroshi Ishiguro, a leading international roboticist, perhaps most well-known for his android creations.That dinner marked the beginning of what has now become more than a decade of us meeting as friends and as collaborators on research about people's social and moral relationships with robots.For our dinner, Ishiguro had chosen a traditional Japanese restaurant.It provided exquisite food and also a quiet ambiance for our conversation, which I remember well, for we spent a few hours arguing about artificial intelligence (AI).Ishiguro said that personified robots with AI were smart and social.More provocatively, he said that these robots will have consciousness and may have it already.He was creating these systems.He said he was creating life.Technological life.I scratched my head as we ate.And then I launched into the basic moves of Searle's Chinese room thought experiment, by which Searle argues that AI systems have syntax but not semantics, mind, or consciousness (Searle 1980(Searle , 1990)).I said that Searle began by asking us to imagine that he was placed in a room containing baskets of Chinese symbols, with a rule book in English that could match Chinese symbols with meaningful output of other Chinese symbols.Outside the room Chinese people would write questions to Searle and hand them into the room.Although Searle has no understanding of the Chinese language, he can take the Chinese "squiggles"-as they appear to himfrom the written questions and use his English rule book to match them with other Chinese squiggles.These he then passes back to the Chinese people outside the room, who consider them a coherent response.Searle (1990) goes on to say: Now, the rule book is the "computer program."The people who wrote it are "programmers," and I am the "computer."The baskets full of symbols are the 14 Consciousness, Authenticity, and Transcendence of Social Robots