Do we want AI to be Conscious?

Imagine opening your fridge in the morning: “ Hey Fridge, how do you feel today? “, “ cold and empty as everyday”, “ nice!” Well that would be weird, but it opens us the doors to think about the shape of our world if our machines were conscious about themselves.

But what do we mean by consciousness?

Some scientists tend to define consciousness as a subjective experience, meaning the ability to self-stimulate in the future. If a cat can see itself eating its next meal, it would be conscious by definition.

But is this what consciousness is really about? No, otherwise it would have been an easy subject to discuss and implement.

The mechanisms of consciousness -the reasons we have a vivid and direct experience of the world and of the self- the truth is that they remain an unsolved mystery in neuroscience, and some people think they will always be; it seems impossible to explain subjective experience using the objective methods of science. But after 25 years or so of taking consciousness seriously as a target of scientific scrutiny, we have made significant progress. We have discovered neural activity that correlates with consciousness, and we have a better idea of what behavioral tasks require conscious awareness. Our brains perform many high-level cognitive tasks subconsciously.

Besides giving us some (imperfect) degree of self-understanding, consciousness helps us achieve what neuroscientist Endel Tulving has called “mental time travel”. We are conscious when predicting the consequences of our actions or planning for the future. I can imagine what it would feel like if I waved my hand in front of my face even without actually performing the movement. I can also think about going to the kitchen to make coffee without actually standing up from the couch in the living room.

In fact, even our sensation of the present moment is a construct of the conscious mind. We see evidence for this in various experiments and case studies. Patients with agnosia who have damage to object-recognition parts of the visual cortex can’t name an object they see, but can grab it. If given an envelope, they would orient their hand to it.

Here is another cool fact about consciousness! The function of consciousness is to broaden our temporal window on the world — to give the present moment an extended duration. Our field of conscious awareness maintains sensory information in a flexible, usable form over a period of time after the stimulus is no longer present. The brain keeps generating the sensory representation when there is no longer direct sensory input.

Any pocket calculator programmed with statistical formulas can provide an estimate of confidence, but no machine yet has our full range of metacognitive ability. Some philosophers and neuroscientists have sought to develop the idea that metacognition is the essence of consciousness. So-called higher-order theories of consciousness posit that conscious experience depends on secondary representations of the direct representation of sensory states. When we know something, we know that we know it. Conversely, when we lack this self-awareness, we are effectively unconscious.

The weird thing is that consciousness is not tentatively a necessary byproduct of our cognition. The same is presumably true of AIs. In many science-fiction stories, machines develop an inner mental life automatically, simply by virtue of their sophistication, but it is more likely that consciousness will have to be expressly designed into them.

But the main reason we choose to look after consciousness in AI research is the question: If we can’t figure out why AIs do what they do, why don’t we ask them? We can endow them with metacognition.

And we have solid scientific and engineering reasons to try to do that. Our very ignorance about consciousness is one. The engineers of the 18th and 19th centuries did not wait until physicists had sorted out the laws of thermodynamics before they built steam engines. It worked the other way round: Inventions drove theory, and so it is today. Debates on consciousness are often too philosophical and spin around in circles without producing tangible results. The small community of us who work on artificial consciousness aims to learn by doing.

Our AIs already have sophisticated training models, but they rely on us giving them data to learn from. With counterfactual information generation, AIs would be able to generate their own data — to imagine possible futures they come up with on their own. That would enable them to adapt flexibly to new situations they haven’t encountered before. It would also furnish AIs with curiosity. When they are not sure what would happen in a future they imagine, they would try to figure it out: with counterfactual information, AIs would be able to imagine possible futures on their own.

Researchers now work on a project called “machine phenomenology” by analogy with phenomenology in philosophy, which studies the structures of consciousness through systematic reflection on conscious experience. To avoid the additional difficulty of teaching AIs to express themselves in a human language, the project currently focuses on training them to develop their own language to share their introspective analyses with one another.

And if we consider introspection and imagination as two of the ingredients of consciousness, perhaps even the main ones, it is inevitable that we eventually conjure up a conscious AI! Because those functions are clearly useful to any machine. We want our machines to explain how and why they do what they do. Building those machines will exercise our own imagination. It will be the ultimate test of the counterfactual power of consciousness.

But the subject itself faces some moral dilemmas. According to some researchers, what if AI would be conscious? What if an AI would be able to feel? Would it be okay to turn it off? Should they have rights? AI’s consciousness brings a lot of questions to the table, but the sure thing is that in the real world, whatever risks AIs may pose do not depend on them being conscious. Conscious machines could help us manage the impact of AI technology. It’s up to you how you answer the question: would you rather share the world with conscious machines or with thoughtless automatons?