For the past decade, the scientist Suzanne Gildert has been working to imbue robots and AIs with new skills. She co-founded a pair of start-ups - Kindred and Sanctuary AI - that strove to add intelligence to robotic arms and bodies. The results were robotic arms that could do factory work at Kindred and then an upscaled, much weirder version of the technology at Sanctuary.
In the background, Gildert spent much of her time longing to really bring robots and AIs to life. She’s been an advocate of a very sci-fi future where humans and androids go about the world alongside each other and share in their day-to-day lives. Gildert has pined for a future in which our metal companions have thoughts and feelings that resemble ours.
Her latest start-up - Nirvanic Consciousness Technologies Inc. - is an attempt to bring those hopes and dreams to fruition.
Gildert contends that current AI systems based on large language models are likely too limited to result in consciousness (or something like it) arising. Her theory is that the roots of consciousness may actually come from AI models derived from the quantum realm where physics gets funkier.
Gildert will forever be better than I am at explaining her hypothesis. So get comfy, open your mind and have a listen.
Really? It’s easier to believe, “In the beginning God created…”!
I am convinced consciousness is rooted in corporeal form and its interaction with its environment. For other reasons I think of the many comedy narratives about what is most important in our bodies. I think we will develop artificial consciousness via practical robots and as they develop complexity in interacting with their environments. I think as organisms we overrate our level of consciousness and underrate that of simpler organisms.
It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461
It won’t happen, but there are bigger things at stake with quantum consciousness.
https://soulinc.substack.com/p/can-artificial-intelligence-ever