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Articles

Could a Robot be Conscious?

Brian King says only if some specific conditions are met.

Will robots always be just machines with nothing going on inside, or could they become conscious things with an inner life? If they developed some kind of inner world, it would seem to be like killing them if we scrapped them. Disposal of our machines would become a moral issue.

There are at least three connected major aspects of consciousness to be considered when we ask whether a robot could be conscious. First, could it be self-conscious (as in ‘self-aware’)? Second, could it have emotions and feelings? And third, could it think consciously – that is, have insight and understanding in its arguments and thoughts? The question is therefore not so much whether robots could simulate human behaviour, which we know they can do to increasing degrees, but whether they could actually experience things, as humans do. This of course leads to a big problem – how would we ever know?

In the Turing Test, a machine hidden from view is asked questions by a human, and if that person thinks the answers indicate he’s talking to another person, then the conclusion is that the machine thinks.

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