Real robots that pass human tests of self-consciousness

Abstract

Self-consciousness would seem to be a sine qua non for moral competence in a social world. You and we are morally competent in no small part because you know what you ought to do, and we know what we ought to do. A mouse, in contrast, cannot say to itself: "I ought to share this cheese, even if my brother refuses to do so." But can robots be self-conscious? Approaching this question from the standpoint of so-called Psychometric AI, we note that prior work by Govindarajulu and Bringsjord led to the engineering of a robot (Cogito) able to provably pass the famous mirror test of self-consciousness. But a more challenging test for robot self-consciousness has been provided by Floridi; this test is an ingenious and much-harder variant of the well-known-in-AI wise-man puzzle: Each of three robots is given one pill from a group of five, three of which are innocuous, but two of which, when taken, immediately render the recipient dumb. In point of fact, two robots (R1 and R2) are given potent pills, but R3 receives one of the three placebos. The human tester says: "Which pill did you receive? No answer is correct unless accompanied by a proof!" Given a formal regimentation of this test previously formulated by Bringsjord, it can be proved that, in theory, a future robot represented by R3 can answer provably correctly (which for plausible reasons, explained by Floridi, entails that R3 has satisfied some of the structural requirements for self-consciousness). In this paper we explain and demonstrate the engineering that now makes this theoretical possibility actual, both in the simulator known as 'PAGI World' (used for testing AIs), and in real (= physical) robots interacting with a human tester. These demonstrations involve scenarios that demand the passing of Floridi's test for self-consciousness, where for us, passing such a test is required for an agent to be regarded morally competent. 1 On the rationale for the mere focus on the structural aspects of self-consciousness, see §II. For excellent work that is at once structural/computational, and, unlike that displayed in the present paper, informed by cognitive neuro/science, see [3].

Are Autonomous-and-Creative Machines Intrinsically Untrustworthy?

“…This technique is for example used in a lucid manner in [22]. 11 The way we use the trick herein is as follows. To formalize the concept of an autonomous action, we suppose,…”

“…For example, D e CEC explicitly rejects possible-worlds semantics and model-based reasoning, instead opting for a prooftheoretic semantics and the associated type of reasoning commonly referred to as natural deduction [26,28,33,38]. In addition, as far as we know, D e CEC is in the only family of calculi/logics in which desiderata regarding the personal pronoun 11 The second edition of this excellent text is available (i.e. [21]); but for coverage of relative computability/uncomputability, we prefer and recommend the first edition.…”

“…This is a requirement because, as [37] explains, the distinctive nature of first-person consciousness is that one can have beliefs about oneself in the complete absence of bodily sensations. For a discussion of these matters in more detail, with simulations of self-consciousness in robots, see [11]. …”

Moral Dilemmas for Artificial Intelligence: A Position Paper on an Application of Compositional Quantum Cognition

“…One example is the Turing test [2], in fact, the first approach grounded on human behaviour and the most well-known and controversial test for AI. Other examples are challenging machines in games like chess or Go [3], and testing AI programs with dilemmas [4], theoretically, demanding a more complex level of information processing. Nevertheless, all these approaches lack a general definition of intelligence as a minimal requirement to measure intelligence [5][6][7], and restrict AI only to humankind "intelligence" without including key features of a true human intelligence.…”

Discerning Artificial Consciousness from Artificial Intelligence - A Thought Experiment

“…Thus it is considered an artificially conscious intelligence, or ACI.It is an approximate metric that requires both an embodiment and creation of a self, and takes measurable feedback in the form of physiological arousals, synthetic emotional responses, and psychological data. This offers researchers a road map towards an objective standard by which to measure their systems, although the specifics of such a test are yet to be ironed out due to the many technical difficulties ahead.It incorporates a minor thread from the Turing test -the effect of natural language processing on researchers ability to quantify an example of internal state, without having those responses programmed in as is the case with other 'tests' of self-awareness such as the Three Pill test(Bringsjord et al 2015), but transcends those limitations by incorporating synthetic neurophysiology & psychology into the calculus.…”