Slashdot Mirror
Robot Demonstrates Self-awareness
shinyplasticbag writes "A new robot can recognize the difference between a mirror image of itself and another robot that looks just like it. ... The ground-breaking technology could eventually lead to robots able to express emotions."
The complete program:
while(1) {
sleep(0.05);
if(ovservation = sight.recent_movement()) {
light['I see someone else'].flash();
wheels.move(observation);
} else {
wheels.move(int rand(2) - 1);
if(sight.recent_movement()) {
light['I see myself'].flash();
}
}
}
First off, this is NOT a new robot. The robot pictured is a commercially available mobile robot called Khepera II. These robots are fairly stupid, but are easily tethered to more capable machines via a 19200 baud serial link. Mostly, they're used in research (usually undergraduate) because there are whole hosts of Matlab libraries available to interface to these buggers.
/dev/ttyS0 at 19200 baud with one second timeout
bot=kopen([0,19200,1]); % open a connection to tethered robot on
And so on and so forth. The Khepera robots have been available for many years, along with the k-team matlab resources. That aside, what the robot in question seems to be doing is using the Matlab Neural Network Toolbox to recognize and classify behavior by observation. Sorry folks, but kids at underfunded state schools do this as undergraduate work in AI. This is nothing new.
Abstract:
This paper presents a clear-cut definition of consciousness of humans, consciousness of self in particular. The definition "Consistency of cognition and behavior generates consciousness" explains almost all conscious behaviors of humans. A "consciousness system" was conceived based on this definition and actually constructed with recurrent neural networks. We succeeded in implementing imitation behavior, which we believe is closely related to consciousness, by applying the consciousness system to a robot.
This belongs to the branch of AI informally known as "faking it". There's a long history of work in this area, starting with ELIZA and continuing through a long series of rather lame systems. The latest systems are intended to mimic the behavior of call center employees.
Sadly, this isn't a joke.
Umm, no. There are plenty of disagreements over the nature of consciousness, but this is just sillyness that not even a hard core analytic functionalist should care to defend. A good intro to the subject can be found in the (excellent) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanfod Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Freud isn't the last word in psychology any more than Newton was the last word in physics. His work was pioneering and insightful but the world has moved on since then, and some of his original research was flawed.
As far as I'm concerned, this advance isn't anything near what the news entry makes it out to be. Just because it can recognize itself in a mirror doesn't mean it's self-aware. We can't even define consciousness, let alone measure it. Well, unless you use an arbitrary numerical value from 3-18, with 10 as normal human average.