Experimental robot shows signs of self-awareness

From little robots that vacuum the floor to Google's self-driving cars, we are beginning to experience what an "intelligent" robot might be capable of. Yet there is still so much more that needs to be learned about actual human intelligence and how to replicate that in computers and robots. Selmer Bringsjord, a professor of computer science and cognitive science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., recently led an experiment with three programmable NAO Robots in hopes of showing that these humanoid machines can be self-aware. This was, in part, in response to an open challenge leveled by Luciano Floridi, a noted professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford. "Floridi's challenge, which we refer to as'KG4,' requires that a robot have a form of genuine self-understanding ... a human-level justification/proof to accompany the behavior, in which the robot employ a correlated to the personal pronoun'I,' and the inputs have to come in natural language, in real time," says Dr. Bringsjord in an e-mail.