Towards Machine Consciousness?

Emotional and fascinating lectures and discussions were held at the AAAI 2019 Spring Symposium „Towards Conscious AI Systems“ at Stanford University. Machine consciousness is a research area located between artificial intelligence and cognitive robotics. The aim is the creation of a synthetic consciousness or self-consciousness. This simulates human consciousness or self-consciousness, approaches it a little or reproduces it in parts. Or it reaches the original, is identical with it in essential parts, which until further notice is far away from reality. Some of the topics that the symposium covered include the following: recent work on conscious AI systems, embodied conscious AI systems, self-reflective higher-order AI systems, ethical issues involving conscious AI systems and trust in conscious AI systems. Further interesting symposia were „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