To understand what a self-conscious machine is, we will delve into Artificial Intelligence. We can live in denial and stop it, but it is everywhere. Most of our crucial decisions happen with the help of an artificial intelligence algorithm. We like it or not, it doesn’t matter. You want to find a partner, there are algorithms driven applications for that. We want to buy something for gifts, there are algorithms throbbed in our faces from various merchants. You name it. It almost feels like a dystopia where someone else is driving our decisions. We don’t make them, but we get assisted in making those decisions so much, I wonder how our parents or grandparents made their decision on their own.
Automation is changing the landscape of manufacturing jobs. In the near future, we won’t have low-wage jobs in stores, all those will be replaced by machines. It wouldn’t be any different for all those white-collared jobs of programming, marketing. Artificial Intelligence will replace all that.
He stormed into a store that was lit with fluorescent lamps everywhere. He didn’t have money in his pocket, but hungry, frustrated, he picked up whatever he wanted. And he ate the food he was looking for so many days. When he was done, he wanted to escape from there. As soon as he crossed the red line, the alarm ringed the danger and the iron doors of the store came down. All was lost, he was arrested within a few minutes.
Well, that was an imaginary scene. It’s pretty much possible in the near future. OR that story of a pedestrian by Ray Bradbury.
Current Situation
Artificial Intelligence has big strides to make. In our day-to-day life, we are using artificial general intelligence. But how will this shape the future? One question that continued to bother researchers from the beginning of this field was
Can we emulate human intelligence in some kind of a system?
The question boggles every individual at some level. As a researcher, what we’re looking for is a system that can be creative, shows imagination, contains intrinsic motivation and figures out the most simpler tasks consciously.
We have machines that do automated jobs for us every now and then. They do that one task pretty damn good. Washing Machines, Robots that clean the house. But add more than one task and it becomes complex for the so-called smart machines.
On the outskirt, it all seems so easy to have a machine that can be intelligent since we have computers, robots, we have been in space. But the one simple fact that separates these machines from us, is the self-awareness. We are self-conscious, self-aware animals. Is a self-conscious machine possible even?
Consciousness
What date is today? It’s January 3rd. Every moment, we need to know certain things, we try to remember those things if we feel we have forgotten. We look ourselves in the mirror and think, I am looking good. It’s the awareness about ourselves and allowing ourselves to correct if we are doing something wrong. It’s also our ability to survive and procreate which is mostly evolutionary. We can sense the danger, we can evaluate crucial moments in life to find the right choice.
Consciousness is all around us, the way we observe, the way we talk, the way we sense, the way we smell. Despite the understanding of consciousness, it’s almost impossible to completely grasp everything about consciousness. Even the smartest researchers get confused in explaining the vastness of our consciousness. Maybe that’s why despite so much research in AI hasn’t really helped to build a machine with consciousness.
Why is it hard to build a self-conscious machine?
When Alan Turing talked about thinking machines, the idea was that if a system could pass an intelligence test that would make them human, then they are human. But will machines ever be human or more human than humans?
We can surely build machines that can do absolutely creative, crazy things. The challenge is will they feel empathy, sadness, kindness, love, passion, anger like us? Emotion makes the challenge to build such machines even harder. The research in AI might not have helped to build machines, but it has helped us to understand our own limitations.
The complexity of a human mind is unfathomable, at least to some extent. I am optimistic in thinking that we can build machines that will help us do some of the marvelous things. I am pessimistic in thinking that if we end up building super-intelligent machines that might end up destroying our society and its fabric.
The hardest part of building machines with consciousness or AI machines is that if they will ever be able to figure out general-purpose tasks that we humans do on a daily basis. Like, if I am walking through mud and getting dirty, then I come home and take a shower. The shower might be a task which we do in certain conditions. So we can program that in the machine, but will the machine be able to figure out that it was in the mud and got dirty?
Artificial Intelligence
We have seen experts talking about the danger of AI. Is that fear real? Should we be scared if we end building some AI that might destroy humans, our society?
I don’t know. I like to be imaginative. Our society is built on trust and if we break the trust we face consequences. So it will be the same with AI. AI is not about an individual. It will take the mind of few, the mind of organizations, the mind of groups, the mind of society.
Every society will get an AI that it deserves – Joscha Bach
One thing I am sure of is that we are nowhere close to build a self-conscious machine. It will take us a few more decades where we can think of these kinds of machines.
We can imagine all sorts of dystopian future or think we are currently living in.