A blast of old-fashioned optimism from Owen Holland: let’s just build a conscious robot!

It’s a short video so Holland doesn’t get much chance to back up his prediction that if you’re under thirty you will meet a conscious robot. He voices feelings which I suspect are common on the engineering and robotics side of the house, if not usually expressed so clearly: why don’t we just get on and put a machine together to do this? Philosophy, psychology, all that airy fairy stuff is getting us nowhere; we’ll learn more from a bad robot than twenty papers on qualia.

His basic idea is that we’re essentially dealing with an internal model of the world. We can now put together robots with an increasingly good internal modelling capability (and we can peek into those models); why not do that and then add new faculties and incremental improvements till we get somewhere?

Yeah, but. The history of AI is littered with projects that started like this and ran into the sand. In particular the idea that it’s all about an internal model may be a radical mis-simplification. We don’t just picture ourselves in the world, we picture ourselves picturing ourselves. We can spend time thinking just about the concept of consciousness – how would that appear in a model? In general our conscious experience is complex and elusive, and cannot accurately be put on a screen or described on a page (though generations of novelists have tried everything they can think of).

The danger when we start building is that the first step is wrong and already commits us to a wrong path. Maybe adding new abilities won’t help. Perhaps our ability to model the world is just one aspect of a deeper and more general faculty that we haven’t really grasped yet; building in a fixed spatial modeller might turn us away from that right at the off. Instead of moving incrementally towards consciousness we might end up going nowhere (although there should be some pretty cool robots along the way).

Still, without some optimism we’ll certainly get nowhere anyway.