The creators of many cutting-edge artificial intelligence projects say their job is to create a special machine with some kind of analogue of consciousness, which could be developed taking into account the idea that the human brain simply encodes and processes multisensory information received from various sources. Thus, it is assumed that once the basic functions of the brain for receiving and processing information are fully understood, similar algorithms can be programmed into a computer. Microsoft recently announced that it is willing to spend $ 1 billion to develop such an artificial “consciousness”. However, most robotics experts believe that it is impossible to create a truly thinking robot for a number of reasons.
Can a robot think?
Despite the fact that attempts to build the first "mechanically intelligent creature" have been going on for more than a dozen years, none of these attempts have been crowned with any significant success. Due to the fact that living organisms accumulate experience in their brains, adapting neural connections in an active process between the subject and the environment, rather than writing data into short-term and long-term memory blocks, neuroscientists still have not learned how to create at least partially intelligent mechanisms. The human mind actively explores the environment in order to find certain elements that direct us to perform any action. Even the most common and everyday task, which does not require large energy inputs from the body, is associated with the use of several areas of the brain at once. Learning skills and gaining life experience includes some reorganization of the brain structure and some physical changes, such as changing the strength of connections between neurons. Such complex transformations cannot be fully recreated on a computer with a fixed architecture, which greatly complicates the task for developers and neuroscientists who are looking for a solution to such a complex problem.
Can consciousness be calculated?
Every mentally healthy person is able to be aware of what he is thinking at the moment. Despite the fact that such a quality may seem simple and unpretentious to us, it is precisely this quality that becomes impossible for the computer brain.
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In the middle of the 20th century, the German quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg, who is now considered one of the founders of modern quantum mechanics, showed that there is a clear difference in the nature of a physical event and the conscious knowledge of an observer. This observation was interpreted in more detail by the famous Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who argued that consciousness cannot arise simply from any physical process, similar to a computer, which reduces all operations to basic logical arguments.
Recent medical research also confirms the fact that there are no unique structures in the brain that exclusively control consciousness. According to livescience.com, a recent experience with MRI imaging has shown that different cognitive tasks occur in different areas of the brain. Thanks to the experiment, neuroscientists were able to come to the conclusion that consciousness may not be something a single whole, but it may well exist as a whole set of consciousnesses distributed in time and space within the same organism.
But for such a turn, robotics was definitely not ready.
Daria Eletskaya