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Rodney Brooks
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Planet Green
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Rodney Brooks Panasonic Professor of Robotics (emeritus), MIT
TRANSCRIPT:
To me, in principle, a robot can have consciousness, can have consciousness, if we can figure out how to build it. But whether we'll -- at what point we would accept consciousness is a completely different question. We can't tell whether dolphins are intelligent. That's an ongoing debate: How intelligent are dolphins? There's a debate: Do dogs have any consciousness at all, or are they stimulus-response creatures?
Some people will tell you dogs have some aspects of consciousness. They have desires. They have emotions. Others will say, "No, no, no. We can't let dogs have emotions. That's uniquely human." So to me, believing in a mechanistic universe, robots will be able to have consciousness and will be able to have emotions, but whether we can understand that or give them that in an emotional sense is another question.
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Though the word "consciousness" is hard to define in exact terms, most people would find it equally hard to imagine a machine gaining consciousness. Something about the concept of consciousness seems inherently tied to organic creatures and the human mind. A better question might be, "If a machine were to gain consciousness, would we recognize it?" Some machines can detect changes in the environment through sensor arrays. Some can decide which commands to execute based upon that information. But we still wouldn't call these machines conscious.
Ask a robot soldier that question and you're likely to get an error message in response. As of yet, robots that are autonomous -- meaning they can make complex decisions and act on their own -- are still in the research phase. When the results are in, robot soldiers will march fearlessly into combat, differentiate between friends and foes, find targets and annihilate them. NASA, the U.S. Army and several universities are hard at work toward this goal. They are trying to combine GPS systems, navigation sensors, perception and collision-detection software in one package, but it isn't easy. Robot soldiers are not nearly advanced enough to think for themselves.
When the U.S. Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) offered up a $2 million prize for a robot vehicle that could independently navigate a 132-mile (212-kilometer) test course, the very best minds competed. Stanford University's team took the prize, and their robot completed the course in six hours and 54 minutes -- not anywhere near the speed needed in battle [source: Hanlon]. Teaching bots to drive through cities and cope with traffic is the next step; still more time will elapse before robots can learn to shoot only at enemies. Even once a robot soldier can do all of these things autonomously, the question remains: Is that robot conscious?
Part of what makes a human soldier effective is his or her consciousness. Even if an autonomous robot has an extremely advanced, computer-based decision-making system, there's no guarantee that it will ever be able to have the emotional intelligence required to exhibit traits like courage, friendliness or mercy.
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