Will we ever have Conscious Machines?
It addresses the philosophical and practical problem of machine consciousness for researchers and AI developers, but is incremental as it reviews existing work without new results.
The paper reviews the current state of machine learning approaches to assess their potential for achieving self-awareness, concluding that while key algorithmic steps toward core consciousness exist, human-level intelligence requires further discoveries.
The question of whether artificial beings or machines could become self-aware or consciousness has been a philosophical question for centuries. The main problem is that self-awareness cannot be observed from an outside perspective and the distinction of whether something is really self-aware or merely a clever program that pretends to do so cannot be answered without access to accurate knowledge about the mechanism's inner workings. We review the current state-of-the-art regarding these developments and investigate common machine learning approaches with respect to their potential ability to become self-aware. We realise that many important algorithmic steps towards machines with a core consciousness have already been devised. For human-level intelligence, however, many additional techniques have to be discovered.