Machine consciousness and sentience: possibilities and limitations

Artificial Intelligence

Machine Sentience

The differences between thinking, intelligence, and consciousness are difficult to determine, but are important to understand when one wishes to study the subject of Artificial Intelligence. Thinking is simply the action of gathering information and processing thoughts in order to reach a reasoned conclusion. This is an action that is seen from small animals to large, in humans, as well as computers. Intelligence, on the other hand, is the ability to make self-aware decisions in order to advance one's own knowledge. Only human beings hold intelligence at this moment in time. Intelligence is, however, something that many believe will be achievable by machines in the future. Finally, Consciousness is the state of being 'aware', which means understanding one's own place amongst one's surroundings. Animals and humans can be conscious, but computers cannot, as of yet.

Machines will indeed gain conscious awareness in the future, and may even be capable of near-human-like thought. (Lohr, 2012) Machines will never think in the same way as humans, however, and will have a completely different way of thinking that may be difficult to understand in the present time. For example, how does a computer's lack of a need of sleep, food, sensation, or death affect its thoughts? This will be an intriguing question to answer once artificial intelligence becomes more advanced in the coming years. Estimation for the first true signs of an artificial intelligence are about 20 years from now, or around 2030. (Bonn, 2012) by this time, computers will have grown more intelligent and AI software will be more advanced, although many new discoveries will have to be made in order to actually have intelligence rather than simply stronger processing power.

Cleverbot or another chatbot being able to fool human beings into believing they are interacting with real humans Is not enough of a proof of consciousness or sentience. The bot is simply responding using patterns of human speech and is not producing its thoughts on its own. Artificial Intelligence will require original thought from the computer, as well as some sort of emotional response or desire to gain more information. It may be said that in the future even more advanced chatbots are going to be invented, ones that will be completely foolproof. Even these, however, will not provide us with enough evidence of intelligence or consciousness. Fooling human beings into thinking that the AI is intelligent is only part of proving its intelligence. The more important aspects are found in the careful studying of the artificial intelligence's behavior in order to find patterns that show an increasingly intelligence program as well as interaction with human beings that is prolonged and intelligent.