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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."
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.
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?
;)
Maybe you could RTFA instead of striving for First Post
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Most ridiculously overhyped slashdot headline ! Ever !
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)
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.
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