Is Anyone Home? A Way to Find Out If AI Has Become Self-Aware

Recent articles by Schneider and Turner (Turner and Schneider, 2017; Schneider and Turner, 2017) outline an artificial consciousness test (ACT); a new, purely behavioral process to probe subjective experience (“phenomenal consciousness”: tickles, pains, visual experiences, and so on) in machines; work that has already resulted in a provisional patent application from Princeton University (Turner and Schneider, in press). In light of the author’s generic skepticism of “consciousness qua computation” (Bishop, 2002, 2009) and Tononi and Koch’s “Integrated Information Theory”-driven skepticism regarding the possibility of consciousness arising in any classical digital computer (due to low φmax) (Tononi and Koch, 2015), consideration is given to the claimed sufficiency of ACT to determine the phenomenal status of a computational artificial intelligence (AI) system. In science and science fiction, the hope is periodically reignited that a computer system will one day be conscious in virtue of its execution of an appropriate program; indeed, as far back as 2004, the UK funding body EPSRC awarded an “Adventure Fund” grant [GR/S47946/01] of around £500,000, to a team of “Roboteers and Psychologists” at the Universities of Essex and Bristol, with a goal of instantiating “machine consciousness” in a humanoid-like robot called Cronos. In addition, extant claims of “machine consciousness” have long been claimed in the scientific literature. (For example, in 2002, Kevin Warwick announced his “Cybernetic learning robots” to be “as conscious as a slug” (Warwick, 2002).) Other proposals for conscious machines have ranged from the mere “functional consciousness” of Stan Franklin’s “Intelligent Distribution Agent” (Franklin, 2003) to the claim of “true conscious cognition” of [Pentti] “Haikonen’s Cognitivist Architecture” (HCA), an architecture that seeks to reproduce the processes of perception, inner imagery, inner speech, pain, pleasure, emotions, and the cognitive functions behind these. Haikonen has asserted that, when implemented with sufficient complexity, HCA will develop consciousness (Haikonen, 2012). It is in this febrile atmosphere that Schneider and Turner (2017) highlight the importance of a test to ascertain machine consciousness as (i) it may be deemed morally improper to oblige such machines to “serve” humans; (ii) it could raise safety concerns; and (iii) it could impact on the viability of brain-implant technologies (Hampson et al., 2013). Hence, given the impact of an ACT result that ascribes consciousness to machine, it is critical that the test is both robust and accurate; in this context, Schneider and Turner explicitly clarify that passing ACT “... is sufficient but not necessary evidence for AI consciousness.” Given that one of the most forceful indications that humans experience consciousness is that every adult can readily and quickly grasp concepts based on this quality, Schneider and Turner describe their ACT as follows: