Hod Lipson, a mechanical engineer in charge of the Creative Machines Lab at Columbia University in New York, is creating a machine that will have “human-level consciousness” and eclipse “everything else we’ve done.”
Lipson believes that conscious robots may even be able to cure cancer.
Consciousness is one of the most divisive issues in artificial intelligence, but aside from the technological challenge facing achieving it, the word itself is philosophically vague and subjectively defined.
According to The New York Times, scientists try to pin consciousness to specific brain functions, but always face inconclusive results.
Lipson describes consciousness in his own words as the ability to “imagine oneself in the future.”
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He worked to build adaptable machines as a generalized intelligence that can learn to evolve through machine-learned natural selection and respond to changing environments and errors or injuries in the mechanical body.
Machines will not only learn and repair, but will be able to imagine how they can improve.
As humans anthropomorphize human characteristics into non-humans, particularly machines, researchers hope that robots would be able to take on human traits and characteristics, thus projecting humanity into conscious machines.
