Real robots that pass human tests of self-consciousness

摘要

Self-consciousness would seem to be a sine qua non for moral competence in a social world. You and we are morally competent in no small part because you know what you ought to do, and we know what we ought to do. A mouse, in contrast, cannot say to itself: “I ought to share this cheese, even if my brother refuses to do so.” But can robots be self-conscious? Approaching this question from the standpoint of so-called Psychometric AI, we note that prior work by Govindarajulu and Bringsjord led to the engineering of a robot (Cogito) able to provably pass the famous mirror test of self-consciousness. But a more challenging test for robot self-consciousness has been provided by Floridi; this test is an ingenious and much-harder variant of the well-known-in-AI wise-man puzzle: Each of three robots is given one pill from a group of five, three of which are innocuous, but two of which, when taken, immediately render the recipient dumb. In point of fact, two robots (R <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</inf> and R <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</inf> ) are given potent pills, but R <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</inf> receives one of the three placebos. The human tester says: “Which pill did you receive? No answer is correct unless accompanied by a proof!” Given a formal regimentation of this test previously formulated by Bringsjord, it can be proved that, in theory, a future robot represented by R <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</inf> can answer provably correctly (which for plausible reasons, explained by Floridi, entails that R <inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</inf> has satisfied some of the structural requirements for self-consciousness). In this paper we explain and demonstrate the engineering that now makes this theoretical possibility actual, both in the simulator known as ‘PAGI World’ (used for testing AIs), and in real (= physical) robots interacting with a human tester. These demonstrations involve scenarios that demand the passing of Floridi's test for self-consciousness, where for us, passing such a test is required for an agent to be regarded morally competent.