What counts as a conscious thinking machine?

Technology 5 September 2012

Also see: AI cyber-fighter: does it feel human, punk?

HOW close are we to creating a machine that thinks like us? It’s difficult to say: consciousness is the slipperiest aspect of machine intelligence.

Some foresee radically superhuman AI arriving before the middle of the century. Others remain sceptical because although most AI systems are good at the specific things they do – finding web pages, predicting stock prices, flying drones – they lack the key ingredient of general intelligence.

To create a machine with general intelligence, we must focus on what we call agent AIs – systems that can sense their environment and then act on it, and can gather, manipulate and modify knowledge about their own actions and perceptions. As we create more agents with increasing levels of intelligence, so we will move closer to higher levels of observable machine consciousness. The two go together.


But even when some form of artificial consciousness does arrive, how will we be able to recognise it?


A robot college student will likely have a variety of consciousness and experience vaguely similar to that of a human being. But AI systems with very different embodiments might have greatly different, broader sorts of conscious experiences.

Imagine an AI with sensors all over the planet, able to read thousands of web pages and data sets at once and exchange data with other AIs via direct mind-to-mind file transfer. It may sound outrageous, but that’s the direction the work of my own and other AI research teams is heading. I won’t be shocked if we’re there in 10 to 15 years.