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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."
What I want to know is, if we build two of these robots, position them facing each other, and instruct one of them to mirror the other one (i.e. lift your left leg when his right leg is lifted), can the first one recognize someone is mirroring it?
And can these robots still recognize their mirror selves if we secretly place a goatee on them?
I believe one of the reasons why we can recognize ourselves is because we are told what a mirror is for, hence we are constantly updating our self image database. I'm pretty sure I'll get confused too if a cloned me standing in front of me.
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
The minute I read this commentary I thought of a way to do this: LEDs blinking randomly and being matched up by robots as their own. I read the article second, and guess what? That isn't how this works, but it seems similar. In fact, I think they should just put together a basic infrared (invisible) LED, make the robot blink it at a really complex pattern, and if it reads that blinking in a mirror, it not only knows that it is itself, but it also knows how far away it is. LEDs can transmit tens of thousands of cycles of on/off patterns, right? I guess another robot could read this LED, perform an act, and send the same message back, making the original robot believe it's looking in a mirror farther away, but there are ways to fix that (multiple LEDs at a set distance).
I call shens on this self aware robot. Can you do that?
Self awareness is more than seeing a pattern you know you are doing and realizing its you doing it. Self awareness to me means "I know I exist" not just "Hey! That's me!"
Scientists reinvent the same wheel as always, and then say how it will save society. Reason? Finding investors/grants.
This isn't really self-awareness, just some good vision techniques. It recognizes key features of it's "face" compared to the normal face. Reminds me of the kind of things they use in face-recognition for security.
I don't think being able to tell the difference between a reflection and not a reflection makes a robot self aware. True self awareness comes when a robot can actually think and communicate in ways it wasn't originally programmed to.
Most ridiculously overhyped slashdot headline ! Ever !
but my quick on the draw guess: it's the illusion of self-awareness.
some day the illusion will be so good, we'll have some difficult questions to deal with...
Demonstrating "Self Awareness" is one thing, but defining it is probably the first step. I don't think there is a commonly accepted definition for this. The ability of two perfectly identical twins (hypothetically) to distinguish themselves, IMO is not self awareness, that's self identification. If a robot can identify itself in a group photograph, standing besides several other model look-alikes accurately (I wonder how this could be done), then that is self identification. I have trouble identifying one chimp from another, but no trouble distinguishing one human from another, sometimes even identical twins. Humans can identify their dog from a group of dogs of the same breed as theirs - clearly that's not "self-awareness". The same can be said for other pets or those working closely with wild animals. I believe there should be a different term used here.
No Greater Friend, No Greater Enemy! (Lucius Cornelius Sulla)
Facial/Body/Robot Recognition != Self-Awareness.
These are algorithms, pure and simple, and do not on themselves constitute a self-awareness. Self-awareness would be the robot suddenly talking about wanting beer, and pondering the logistics of whether drinking beer is worth the ensuing short-circuit.
From TFA: A new robot can recognize the difference between a mirror image of itself and another robot that looks just like it.
ok, nice. But also from TFA: blue, red or green LEDs connected to artificial neurons in the region that light up when different information is being processed, based on the robot's behavior.
so... what we actually have is just a flashing-LEDs-based handshaking?
ok, I do understand that even for a flashing LED protocol to recognize itself on a mirror is no simple task, but to jump from that and claim the robot can recognize "the difference between a mirror image of itself"... Talk about sensationalism.
My other account has mod points.
A new robot can recognize the difference between a mirror image of itself and another robot that looks just like it.
Then:
The ground-breaking technology could eventually lead to robots able to express emotions.
Poster can leap farther than Superman!
I think the reference to self-awareness here is based on psychological understandings of self-awareness in human beings. Since Freud the understanding of human self-awareness has located the "mirror stage" as the key moment in child development, the point at which the child becomes aware of him/herself as an independent "self." Of course, the mistake here is to believe that the mirror stage itself is both a necessary and sufficient condition for self-awareness; it is for humans a necessary condition, but it is not a sufficient condition for any entity. Especially in this case, where the robots pass the mirror stage by what is essentially trickery in this context -- achieving not self-awareness but an ability to manifest a particular symptom of self-awareness.
I wish people would sit on their research for awhile sometimes and that readers of these articles wouldn't read into buzzwords like "self-awareness."
1) What is consciousness?
Takeno, oversimplifies the definition.
2) Was the robot picking up on the fact that a mirror image is STILL corrupted information (which is remarkable in itself)?
3) Consciousness works on many levels and may have biological primitives we just don't understand yet. Seems appropriate to call this anything but a robot with better programming--not "self-awareness."
We'll have to wait it to see.
AI? Whatever. Among serious theorists, it is pretty widely accepted that we will never reach a goal of true, hard AI (as in, something we created which is truly every bit as smart, independant, creative and "alive" as us, or even more) by cobbling together algorithms like this. It will come about by building the right sort of neural-net building blocks, arranging them in roughly the right kind of networks (probably via genetic selection algorithms rather than manually), and then teaching it much in the way one raises and teaches a small child. That's *if* we can solve the huge problems that still lie in our way going down that path (not the least of which is raw processing power).
This kind of shit isn't even in the right ballpark, and it's not going down the right road, and it's simply not productive in the long term. But gee, it gets headlines and research grants because it makes laymen say "ohhh neat". AI scientists of the world - I challenge you to get off your collective asses, stop pandering to morons, and get down to business with the decades of work that remain to be done.
11*43+456^2
That's not self-awareness, it's merely self-recognition.
Or rather, it's an identification protocol sent through a loopback channel to a pattern-recognition processor mapping the local identifier value to the response methods associated with itself.
Yeah, I'm tired by these flimsy pop-AI articles too. Your comment about teaching it like we teach a child is really the key, too. I think that most people are going in totally the wrong direction thinking about AI. People seem to think that intelligence is in the hardware, that if we built a "super brain" it would be super smart. But I don't think so: I think that we've already got "super brains" in our heads (in the sense that they blow away any hardware we've been able to concoct with all our high tech chips and such as of yet), but we don't know how to teach them.
:)
Let's make pretend you had a neural net with the exact same properties as the human brain. It would be the most advanced nerual net ever constructed by a huge margin. Now what? Read it nursery rhymes? Make it watch Blues Clues? Send it to public school? And if we instead say it's twice as powerful as the human mind (whatever that means), now what? You think it'll be smarter because...?
I think good AI research is very interesting, and it teaches us about the near-magic behavior of our brains. But I don't believe in it'll lead us to a superintelligence. Maybe it could bring about a faster intelligence, but that's certainly not the same thing. That would be a neural net that reached middle-aged intelligence in only 15 years. But 100 years later do you think it would be smarter? If we extrapolate the way people learn as they age?
I don't know. I guess it comes down to this: us humans are so stupid we can't see how smart we are
Cheers.
Now it gets interesting.. You cannot prove or disprove God either. Some people think it is possible, but as you say, then they have not understood the problem. We're not talking about a biblical God here, which might be anything from hysteria, aliens or propbably many different phenomena attributed to one "God". In the East, God is the Great Thinker, the Great Dreamer, the being which is everything that is, dreaming up all this creation. It is quite unfathomable, and of course totally unprovable by the dream-objects themselves.
So.. What is the relation to self-awareness and God? Well, Eastern mystics also claim God is consciousness, which is basically self-awareness. Atoms in a stone may- or will sometime enter the food-chain, and become a human being, everything is recycled over time. Thus, atoms in a stone has self-awareness, but little way of expressing it before it becomes a human being.
If man is God in His image, then God is self-aware and bestows this on humans and all matter. If you take an evolutionary approach to God, the process we are in is actually to materialize God more and more, as we evolve into more and more self-aware beings. The process is a continuial "making man in His image", it has not stopped yet!
I think many Slashdotters would do themselves a favour and scrap the feverish attacks against Christianity, broaden their vision and research what older scriptures like the Indian Vedas state about God. The deeper roots behind all religions are much more logical and less dogmatic than the proponents today are practicing it.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Why would a DALEK want to exterminate it's mirror image?
The only purpose of a DALEK is to rid the cosmos of everything NOT DALEK so that it can become the supreme master of the universe.
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.