No Arguments Against Consciously Aware Social Robots

The scientific dialogue in this newsletter’s issue, proposed by Janet Wiles, revolves around the question “Will social robots need to be consciously aware?”. Responses are provided by Axel Cleeremans, Yasuko Kitano, Cornelius Weber and Stefan Wermter, Justin Hart and Brian Scassellati, Juyang Weng, Guy Hoffman and Moran Cerf. Several dimensions of the question stand out. First, as we are very far from understanding what “consciousness” is, it appears that building robots capable of various forms of self- and other- awareness, and importantly how they can develop these capabilities progressively, can be very useful in the quest to unveil the underlying mechanisms. Second, as consciousness is a multiscale complex systems, multiple approaches and perspectives need to be taken in this process of robot building. Third, when one looks at applications, it is the function, and not the nature, of consciousness which becomes the relevant angle of analysis, and several ethical questions arise. Then, a new dialog is initiated by Stéphane Doncieux on the topic of representational redescription. It has long been known in AI that having a good representation is key for machines to solve complex problems. However, so far good representations have been pre-programmed by engineers. What technical approaches could we imagine to allow machines to select, and even more important to find, new spaces of representations? Are techniques like deep learning general enough for realising such a challenge for life-long learning robots? Do we need other approaches such as Darwinian mechanisms operating in the brain, like in neural Darwinism?

@Article{WW15, 
 	 author =  {Weber, Cornelius and Wermter, Stefan},  
 	 title = {No Arguments Against Consciously Aware Social Robots}, 
 	 journal = {AMD Newsletter - The Newsletter of the Autonomous Mental Development Technical Committee},
 	 number = {1},
 	 volume = {12},
 	 pages = {6--7},
 	 year = {2015},
 	 month = {},
 	 publisher = {Autonomous Mental Development Technical Committee},
 	 doi = {}, 
 }