Forget about today's humble advances in artificial intelligence like self-driving cars. In fact, everyone is waiting for something different: a machine that is aware of its existence and environment, and that can process massive amounts of data in real time. She could be sent on a dangerous mission, into space or on the battlefield. She could cook, clean, wash, iron, carry people, and even keep company when there are no other people nearby.
Particularly advanced machines could replace humans in literally all workplaces. This would save humanity from black labor, but it would also shake many social foundations. Life without work, turned into leisure, can become unbearable.
Conscious machines also raise troubling legal and ethical issues. Will a conscious machine obey the law and be held accountable for its actions if it hurts someone or if something goes wrong? Imagine a more dire scenario: could such machines rebel against us and destroy humanity? If so, then they represent the culmination of evolution.
Subhash Kak, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science working in machine learning and quantum theory, argues that researchers are divided on whether superconscious machines will ever exist. It also discusses the issues of whether or not machines can or cannot be called "conscious", as if we are thinking about people or some animals. Some of the questions are technology related; others have to do with what consciousness really is.
Is awareness alone enough?
Most computer scientists believe that consciousness is a characteristic that will emerge as technology advances. Others believe that consciousness includes accepting new information, storing and retrieving old information, as well as cognitive processing of all this in perception and action. If so, one day machines are supremely conscious. They will be able to extract more information than even a human, store more libraries, access vast databases in milliseconds, and calculate it all in solutions more complex and more logical than humans could ever afford.
On the other hand, there are physicists and philosophers who say that there is more to human behavior than just the sum of the parts, and this cannot be comprehended by a machine. Creativity, for example, and the sense of freedom that people have, do not seem to be related to logic or calculation.
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However, there are other opinions about consciousness and whether a machine can ever acquire it.
Quantum point of view
One point of view about consciousness stems from quantum theory, one of the most proven theories in physics. According to the classical Copenhagen interpretation, consciousness and the physical world are complementary aspects of the same reality. When a person observes something, conducts experiments, some aspects of the physical world change under the influence of human consciousness. Since the Copenhagen Interpretation takes consciousness for granted and does not try to extract it from physics, consciousness within this interpretation exists on its own - however, it requires brains to become real. This view was popular with pioneers of quantum theory such as Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger.
The interaction between mind and matter leads to paradoxes that remain unresolved after 80 years of controversy. A well-known example of such controversy is the Schrödinger's cat paradox, in which a cat finds itself in a situation in which it is either fat or dead - and the very act of observation makes the conclusion unambiguous.
The opposite point of view is that consciousness is born from biology, just as biology itself is born from chemistry, which, in turn, is born from physics. This concept of consciousness suits neuroscientists who believe that mental processes are identical to the states and processes of the brain. It also agrees with one of the relatively new interpretations of quantum theory - the many-worlds interpretation, in which observers are part of mathematical physics.
Philosophers from science believe that modern concepts of quantum mechanics about consciousness have parallels in ancient philosophy. For example, according to Vedanta, consciousness is the fundamental basis of reality, just like the physical universe.
Other concepts are more similar to Buddhism. Although Buddha preferred not to question the nature of consciousness, his followers claimed that mind and consciousness arise from emptiness or nothing.
Copenhagen's interpretation of consciousness and scientific discoveries
Scientists are also studying whether consciousness is always a computational process. Some scholars argue that the creative moment does not end with deliberate computation. For example, dreams or visions are believed to have inspired Elias Howe in 1845 for the consciousness of the modern sewing machine and August Kekule's discovery of the structure of benzene in 1862.
Powerful evidence for the Copenhagen interpretation of consciousness comes from the life of the self-taught Indian mathematician Srinivas Ramanujan, who died in 1920 at the age of 32. His notebook, which was lost and forgotten for 50 years and then published in 1988, contained several thousand forms without proofs in various areas of mathematics that were well ahead of their time. The methods by which he found his formulas are also unknown. However, the case itself cannot be called reliable. Another thing is important.
The Copenhagen interpretation of consciousness raises questions about how it relates to matter and how matter and mind affect each other. Consciousness itself cannot make physical changes to the world, but it may affect the probability in the evolution of quantum processes. The act of observation can freeze and even influence the movement of atoms, as physicists at Cornell University proved in 2015. This can perfectly explain the interaction of matter and mind.
Mind and self-organizing systems
Perhaps the phenomenon of consciousness requires a self-organizing system, like the physical structure of the brain. If so, modern cars will lag far behind.
Scientists don't know if adaptive self-organizing machines can be as complex as the human brain; we lack the mathematical theory of computation for such systems. Perhaps only biological machines can be creative and flexible enough. But then it suggests that humans will soon have to start working on new biological structures that will - or can become - conscious.
Ilya Khel