I, Robot

Some time ago, I read of this article in the papers that said that some Korean professor, who went by the name of Dr. Kim (why am I not surprised at the name?)had developed artificial chromosomes that would enable robots to have "personality", feel lusty and perhaps even reproduce in the future.

Now, if we allow ourselves to not be distracted by imaginations of how robots make love and other almost comical details, such a breakthrough begs a most important question: can non-living complex systems ever develop a sense of subjective consciousness, or in other words, can AI feel have a sense of "I". At first glance, this might seemed to be a rather trivial question. A robot is definitely not like a human being or even a cat. A robot is what we call a piece of machine, a "box" very much like your television and microwave oven albeit a more complicated one. In the sense that no one in the right mind would think that television really has a consciousness, it should follow that robots no matter how smart would not have a subjective state of awareness. Perhaps. But this way of reasoning simply circumvents the thorny question of what causes consciousness to arise in the first place.

There are two unofficial schools of thoughts on this. Religion dictates the existence of a soul and therefore consciousness is a "product" or manifestation of the soul. And since souls can only be divinely created in a most mysterious way, only humans and (in the case of some non-christian religions) some special animals have souls, therefore robots can never have souls as the makers of robots, humans can never create souls. It therefore follows that robots can never has any subjective state of awareness. Case closed. This of course is the simple way out and we are left none the wise for what is a soul exactly and how does this "ghost" which is non coporeal controls and operates a human body that is very much corporeal. We just have to believe.

The other school of thought is that consciousness or a subjective state of awareness arises from a sufficiently sohpisicated information processing system like our brain. And so does "personality". I think there is a good case for this theory. The simple fact is that when a person's brain is damaged in different areas, the person can either loses his memory, decrease his reasoning abilities, changes his personality drastically or even alter his state of awareness. I am personally much more in favour of this theory and if this is really the case, then making robots so human-like does have very serious ethical implications. We then would need to consider if such robots have a sense of "I" very much like you and I, and if so, then they probably deserve to be protected in the same way that humans and animals are under the laws. And determining this is no mean task, simply because you cannot just open the robot's head and peek inside to see if it is "conscious". I do not think that a fellow human being has a "consciousness" because I open his head, I deduce that from observing his purposeful behaviours, the emotions he shows and from inductive reasoning that since I am human and I have "consciousness" then you should have it too. To be able to determine if a robot has the same kind of "consciousness" that humans do demand an absolute understanding of what give rises to consciousness, a knowledge which we do not have yet. Of course religions already have the ready-made answer as they have for everything in the world. Do you wish to just take this off the shelf answer or do you think that such an important question should not be left to blind faith? The choice is yours.