Towards Machine Consciousness?

There were emotional and fascinating lectures and discussions at the AAAI 2019 Spring Symposium, „Towards Conscious AI Systems“, held at Stanford University. Machine consciousness or artificial consciousness is an interdisciplinary research area spanning artificial intelligence and cognitive robotics. The goal is to create synthetic consciousness or self-awareness. This simulates, approaches, or reproduces human consciousness or self-consciousness in parts. Alternatively, it could reach the original and be identical with it in essential parts, although this remains far from reality. Topics covered at the symposium included recent work on conscious AI systems, embodied conscious AI systems, self-reflective higher-order AI systems, and ethical and trust issues involving conscious AI systems. Other interesting symposia included „Interpretable AI for Well-Being: Understanding Cognitive Bias and Social Embeddedness“ and „Privacy-Enhancing Artificial Intelligence and Language Technologies“. More information via aaai.org/Symposia/Spring/sss19.php.

Fig.: One of the machine consciousness talks at Stanford University