Robots and Machine Consciousness

Abstract

to employ robots as tools to model and to understand biological aspects of consciousness;• to study procedures aimed at mea sur ing consciousness in robots;• to discuss ethical prob lems emerging through the overlap of robotics and consciousness. A Brief History of Robot ConsciousnessTo the best of the author's knowledge, the first occurrence of the word "artificial consciousness" is found in the book Cybernetic Machines by T. N. Nemes, published in Hungary in 1962.The book was translated into En glish in 1970.Nemes, in this early attempt, considered artificial consciousness as the capability of a robot to discriminate between self and others.The author proposed a conceptual sketch of a cir cuit able to distinguish between proprioceptive inputs that generate sentences as "I go" from shape recognition and motion perception cir cuits that pro cess data from external inputs able to create sentences as "Peter goes."The modern scientific framework of artificial and robot consciousness has been primarily introduced by Igor Aleksander (1992, 2015).At the ICANN 1992 Conference in Brighton, Aleksander presented a paper on capturing consciousness in neural systems, where he proposed the postulates defining a conscious organism that may be applied to a biological organism or an artifact.Notably, during the invited talk, Aleksander announced that the "hunting season of artificial consciousness is open."Another influential early model for machine consciousness is due to Schmidhuber (1992).He discussed machine consciousness by presenting an unsupervised neural network able to discover and learn unexpected events.The symposium on "Can a Machine Be Conscious," or ga nized by the Swartz Foundation in 2001, was another milestone for robot consciousness.The concluding remarks of Christof Koch, valid still today, stated that "we know of no fundamental law or princi ple operating in this universe that forbids the existence of subjective feelings in artifacts designed or evolved by humans." 1 Since 2001, many conferences, workshops, and special issues of journals have been devoted to the field of robot consciousness.Early works are described in the collections edited by Holland (2003a), Clowes et al. (2007), and Chella and Manzotti (2007b).In 2007, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) or ga nized a fall symposium on "AI and Consciousness," with the proceedings edited by Chella and Manzotti (2007a).Reggia (2013) provided quite an up-to-date review of the field.A collection of recent research papers concerning consciousness in humanoid robots was edited by Chella et al. (2019).During the summer of 2017, SRI International or ga nized a series of workshops on technology and consciousness.The workshops provided a general view of machine consciousness; the outcomes are summarized in a technical report edited by Rushby and Sanchez (2018).A continuous source of information is the Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness (JAIC), formerly known as the International Journal of Machine Consciousness and edited by World Scientific Press.