Progress: Robotic Consciousness

[EdEarl]

This post paraphrases a youtube video, "Are We Approaching Robotic Consciousness?" by ColdFusion.

An experiment was done to demonstrate limited AI consciousness.

Consciousness: aware of one's own existence, sensations, thoughts, surroundings, etc. , by dictionary.com.
Consciousness is the state or quality of awareness, or, of being aware of an external object or something within oneself. by Wikipedia

However, this experiment did not claim AI sentience.

Quote

Wikipedia

Sentience is the capacity to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively.^[1] Eighteenth-century philosophers used the concept to distinguish the ability to think (reason) from the ability to feel (sentience). In modern Western philosophy, sentience is the ability to experience sensations (known in philosophy of mind as "qualia"). In Eastern philosophy, sentience is a metaphysical quality of all things that require respect and care. The concept is central to the philosophy of animal rights because sentience is necessary for the ability to suffer, and thus is held to confer certain rights.

Equipment: 3 small robots that can walk, talk, and listen networked with an AI consciousness application running on a computer. Each robot ran a copy of the AI consciousness application.

Procedure: disable voice on two of the three robots.
Tell all three, "One of you can speak.Do you know which one it is?"

Results: Each robot tries to say, "I don't know which of us can speak."
Two are silent, one is not.
The one that hears himself say, "I don't know which one of us can speak,"
then says, "I now know that I can speak."
An audit trail of AI reasoning shows the robot proved logically that it could speak,
before saying, "I now know that I can speak."

Disclaimer: The quotes above in paragraphs Procedure and Results are not quotes from the video, rather the quoted parts are paraphrasing with quotes added to improve readability. This post is my interpretation of the experiment based on the video; as such it may contain errors.

IMO: The experiment does demonstrate a special case of consciousness according to the dictionary and Wikipedia definitions. On the other hand the AI is not sentient. It cannot compete with human general intelligence, but it suggests that engineers are improving AI rapidly, and seem to be limited by insufficient computer capability. Robot designs are primitive compared to the human body. However, viable solutions to real world challenges will be developed with robot bodies that do not function as humans do.