Can artificial intelligence have consciousness? It's a question that has fascinated researchers and science fiction enthusiasts alike for decades. As AI technologies continue to advance, the possibility of creating conscious machines raises significant questions about the nature of consciousness, the future of humanity, and our relationship with technology. While some argue that AI can be capable of subjective experience and consciousness, others believe that machines are fundamentally incapable of having these experiences. So, can artificial intelligence truly have consciousness?

How Consciousness Can Be Artificially Created? Artificial consciousness, also known as artificial general intelligence, refers to the creation of conscious machines that have human-like intelligence and consciousness. The goal of creating artificial consciousness is to create machines that can think, reason, and act in ways that are similar to human beings. It is modeling and simulating three intelligence-critical things: Reality, as a world knowledge and intelligence platform with its learning and inference engine. Mentality, as artificial consciousness, also known as artificial general intelligence, implying the creation of conscious machines that have human-like intelligence and consciousness.

Enter your email to download this post as a PDF. We will also send you our best business tips every 2 weeks in our newsletter. The latest industrial revolution dubbed Industry 4.0 focuses on using computing power and advanced AI solutions to improve business processes and operations. As a result, AI solutions are quickly taking over most business processes today, leading to new practices and trends the world has never seen before. With that said, you should know that not all AI solutions are made equal. They are all designed to mimic human behavior, but they offer different results.

Let's discuss the various difficulties that need to be overcome in order to create artificial intelligence that can achieve some level of consciousness, let alone a human-like level. Some of the issues include the need to create an AI that can understand and react to the complexities of experiences which stem from the real world, as well as the need to create AI that can understand and replicate the logical workings of the human mind. Sentience is the ability to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively. Machines can currently only experience the world objectively; they cannot feel or perceive subjectively. To create a conscious machine, we need to understand sentience and how to create it.

Robots or advanced artificial intelligences that "wake up" and become conscious are a staple of thought experiments and science fiction. Whether or not this is actually possible remains a matter of great debate. All of this uncertainty puts us in an unfortunate position: we do not know how to make conscious machines, and (given current measurement techniques) we won't know if we have created one. At the same time, this issue is of great importance, because the existence of conscious machines would have dramatic ethical consequences. We cannot directly detect consciousness in computers and the software that runs on them, any more than we can in frogs and insects.

In 2016, Alan Winfield gave an "IdeasLab" talk at the World Economic Forum about building ethical robots. "Could we build a moral machine?" Behind him, pictured on a flatscreen TV, was one of the bots Winfield used in his experiments--a short, cutesy, white and blue human-like machine. Just a few years ago, he said, he believed it to be impossible: You couldn't build a robot capable of acting on the basis of ethical rules. But that was before he realized what you could get robots to do if they had an imagination--or less gradiosely a "consequence engine," a simulated internal model of itself and the world outside. Winfield showed clips of his experiments at the Bristol Robotics Lab in England.

Michael Wooldridge is the winner of the 2021 Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence (EAAI) Outstanding Educator Award. He gave a plenary talk at AAAI/EAAI in February this year, focussing on lessons he has learnt in communicating AI to the public. Michael's public science journey began in 2014 when the press and social media became awash with stories of AI. He wondered who was going to respond to these, often exaggerated, narratives and to add some nuance to the discussion. It turned out that nobody did, and there was a noticeable absence of expert opinion reported.

In 1998, an engineer in Sony's computer science lab in Japan filmed a lost-looking robot moving trepidatiously around an enclosure. The robot was tasked with two objectives: avoid obstacles and find objects in the pen. It was able to do so because of its ability to learn the contours of the enclosure and the locations of the sought-after objects. But whenever the robot encountered an obstacle it didn't expect, something interesting happened: Its cognitive processes momentarily became chaotic. The robot was grappling with new, unexpected data that didn't match its predictions about the enclosure.

The question about the emergence of consciousness is perhaps the most important question humanity should attempt to answer. Consciousness and its contents are at the root of everything. Consciousness is what is responsible for all of the greatest artifacts of culture that humanity has created: art, music, science, philosophy, technology. Every child, adolescent, and adult ought to ask themselves: what is consciousness? What is it like to be human?

This article is part of "the philosophy of artificial intelligence," a series of posts that explore the ethical, moral, and social implications of AI today and in the future Would true artificial intelligence be conscious and experience the world like us? Will we lose our humanity if we install AI implants in our brains? Should robots and humans have equal rights? If I replicate an AI version of myself, who will be the real me? These are the kind of questions we think of when watching science fiction movies and TV series such as Her, Westworld, and Ex Machina.