• Question: Will robots ever become self-aware?

    Asked by ToastWithoutJam to Iulia, Katie, Mateusz, Ollie, Siobhan on 13 Mar 2017.
    • Photo: Iulia Motoc

      Iulia Motoc answered on 13 Mar 2017:

      I think we are very far away from that. Robots can become self-aware only if they are intelligent. They are intelligent only if we make them intelligent. We do not understand how human brain works, in order for us to replicate it.

      I think we still have a lot of things to learn, and robots that are self-aware will not happen during our lifetime.

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 14 Mar 2017:

      That’s a big task! I don’t think we really know what makes something self-aware in the first place 🙂

      However, we do make some progress towards behaviours that look as if robots are self-aware. For example, a NAO robot (which Iulia works with) was programmed to question human commands if it sees danger ahead (video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tu4H1g3CtE).

      We also have research into self-repairing materials – something that a lot of self-aware (and non-self-aware) organisms do.

      Swarm intelligence (which Siobhan works with) was also used to program virtual robots in the StarCraft Artificial Intelligence Tournament (which I think you can even participate in yourself!) If you look it up on YouTube, you’ll see quite advance behaviours you’d expect from self-aware machines, e.g. avoiding danger, cooperating with one another and so on.

    • Photo: Katie Pavey

      Katie Pavey answered on 14 Mar 2017:

      Oooh that’s a tricky one.

      Robots are only as clever as the people that program them, and the program is essentially a list of instructions for the robot to follow. If something unexpected happens, robots become stuck if there isn’t a set of instructions to match.

      So I don’t think they could truly become self aware. However, I think we can get to a point where they could react in a way that would make humans believe they are self aware. Is that the same? I don’t know – I think that’s a much bigger debate!

    • Photo: Siobhan Duncan

      Siobhan Duncan answered on 15 Mar 2017:

      It depends what you mean by that?

      but anything is possible, but I think we are a wee bit away from that at the moment.

      But why don’t you become and engineer and help us try? 🙂

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