Artificial intelligence has taken a big leap forward: two roboticists (Lipson and Zagal), working at the University of Chile, Santiago, have created what they claim is the first robot to possess “metacognition” — a form of self-awareness which involves the ability to observe ones’ own thought processes and thus alter one’s behavior accordingly.
The starfish-like robot (which has but four legs) accomplished this mind-like feat by first possessing two brains, similar to how humans possess two brain hemispheres (left and right*). This provided the key to the automaton’s adaptability within a dynamic, and unpredictable, environment.
The double bot brain was engineered such that one ‘controller’ (i.e., one brain) was “rewarded” for pursuing blue dots of light moving in random circular patterns, and avoiding running into moving red dots. The second brain, meanwhile, modeled how well the first brain did in achieving its goal.
But then, to determine if the bot had adaptive self-awareness, the researchers reversed the rules (red dots pursued, blue dots avoided) of the first brain’s mission. The second brain was able to adapt to this change by filtering sensory data to make red dots seem blue and blue dots seem red; the robot, in effect, reflected on its own “thoughts” about the world and modified its behavior (in the second brain), fairly rapidly, to reflect the new reality.
This achievement represents a significant advancement over earlier successes with AI machines in which a robot was able to model its own body plan and movements in its computer brain, make “guesses” as to which of its randomly selected body-plan models was responsible for the correct behavior (movement), and then eliminate all the unsuccessful models, thus exhibiting an “analogue” form of natural selection (see Bongard, Zykov, Lipson, 2006). **
TOPIO, a humanoid robot, played ping pong at Tokyo International Robot Exhibition (IREX) 2009.
Lipson believes this to be a form of “mind reading”. However, a critic might argue that this is more movement reading, than mind, and that it remains to be proven that the observer bot has any understanding of the other’s “mind”. A behavior (such as the second bot trapping the first) might simulate some form of awareness of another’s thought process, but can we say for sure that this is what is really happening?
One idea that might lend credence to this claim is if the observer bot had a language capacity that allowed it to express its awareness, or ‘theory of mind’. Nearly two decades ago, pioneering cognitive biologists Maturana and Varela posited “Language is the sin qua non of that experience called mind.”
And, achieving such a “languaging” capacity in not out of the question; a few years ago, a team of European roboticists created a community of robots that not only learned language, but soon learned to invent new words and to share these new words with the other robots in the community (see: Luc Steels, of the University of Brussels/SONY Computer Science Laboratory in Paris).
It is conceivable that a similarly equipped robot — also possessing the two-brain structure of Lipson’s robots — could observe itself thinking about thinking, and express this awareness through its own (meta) language. Hopefully, we will be able to understand what it is trying to express when and if it does.
A Pick and Place robot in a factory. You've come a long way droidy.
“Our holy grail is to give machines the same kind of self-awareness capabilities that humans have”
One other question that remains, then: Will the robot develop a more complex simulation/awareness of itself, and the world, as it learns and interacts with the world, as we do?
The four-legged, robot also exhibited another curious behavior: when one of its legs was removed (so that it had to relearn to walk) , it seemed to show signs of what is known as phantom limb syndrome, the sensation ta one still has a limb though it is in fact missing (this is common in people who have lost limbs in war or accidents). In humans, this syndrome represent a form of mental aberration or neurosis (perhaps even an hallucination). A robot acting in this way — holding a false notion of itself — may give scientists and AI engineers a glimpse into robot mental illness.
A robot with a mental illness or neurosis? Yes, this seem entirely likely given the following three theorems:
1] Neurosis is accompanied (and is perhaps a function of) acute self-awareness; the more self-aware, the more potentially neurotic one becomes.
2} Robots with advanced heuristics (enabled by multiple brains, self-simulators and sensor inputs) will inevitably develop advanced self-awareness, thus the greater potential for 1] above.
3] There is an ancient, magickal maxim: Like begets like. The creator is in the created (in Biblical terms: “God made man in his own image.”
What would Freud say about this form of attachment?
a final gift that that testifies to the beauty and power of simplicity.