Dr. Selmer Bringsjord, cognitive science and computer science professor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, led recently a study on the self-awareness of robots. The experiment was motivated by an open challenge proposed by the renowned Luciano Floridi, professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford.
Floridi's challenge, as Dr. Bringsjord explains, requires that a robot have a form of genuine self-awareness and self-understanding, something matching the human-level justification to accompany the behavior, in which the robot refers to itself in a similar manner humans refer to the personal pronoun 'I'".
These quick inputs come for the robot in the form of a natural language. Dr. Bringsjord goes on giving the example of the movie "I. Robot" for those who might have trouble understanding the concept. This movie is one the best fictitious accounts of recent film culture on this scientific concept.
Dr. Bringsjord summarizes that the essence of this challenge is to accomplish designing and building a machine which has the ability to understand its own identity. The professor explains further that this type of cognitive programming has massive implications in the future for growth in learning, not only in robots but in humans as well. This concept is called Artificial Intelligence research psychometric AI.
In order to keep human control over the robots, Dr. Bringsjord explains the importance of knowing the outcome of what a scientist or an engineer is trying to do when evolving AI. He concludes that, without exquisite attention to details in formal logic, mankind should not be building sophisticated robots. No one would want a black-box robot flying itself around or driving a car.
The progress made in building super-intelligence in machines is pushing humankind on the edge of change comparable to the era of rising of human life on Earth, as Vernor Vinge put it. This seems like a pretty intense place to be standing, not only for scientists, engineers and AI researchers, but for the aware general public, as well.
The far future envisioned by science fiction works is coming soon. We witness today a pattern in which, as time goes on, human progress is moving quicker and quicker. The futurist Ray Kurzweil calls this pattern the Law of Accelerating Returns. The reason for this is that more advanced societies have also the ability to progress at a faster rate.
The average rate of advancement between 1955 and 1985 was slower than the rate between 1985 and 2015, because we live now in a more advanced world. Innovation, progress and technological advances are getting bigger and faster, suggesting some pretty intense things about our future. The scientist community calls the moment when the first machine will become self-aware, a singularity.
This will mark down an era of tremendous change in human history. If the current rate of change will prevail, by 2030-2045 the singularity will happen and the world in 2050 might be vastly different than today's world and we would barely recognise it.
