Blog: Can Machines Be Conscious?

Can Machines Be Conscious?
IEEE Spectrum (06/08) Vol. 45, No. 6, P. 55; Koch, Christof; Tononi, Giulio

Some people are convinced that a conscious machine could be constructed within a few decades, including Caltech professor Christof Koch and University of Wisconsin, Madison professor Giulio Tononi, who write that the emergence of an artificially created consciousness may not take the form of the most popular speculations. They note that consciousness requires neither sensory input nor motor output, as exemplified by the phenomenon of dreaming, and emotions are not a necessary component for consciousness, either. Koch and Tononi also cite clinical data to suggest that other traditional elements of consciousness--explicit or working memory, attention, self-reflection, language--may not be essential, while the necessary properties of consciousness depend on the amount of integrated information that an organism or machine can produce. The authors offer the integrated information theory of consciousness as a framework for measuring different neural architectures' effectiveness at generating integrated information and achieving consciousness, and this framework outlines what they describe as "a Turing Test for consciousness." One test would be to ask the machine to concisely describe a scene in a manner that efficiently differentiates the scene's key features from the vast spectrum of other possible scenes. Koch and Tononi suggest that the building of a conscious machine could involve the evolution of an abstracted mammal-like architecture into a conscious entity.
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