The Conscious Machine

The more they learn about artificial intelligence, the more it seems to appear that it is not so different from human and other animal intelligence.  It is no longer doubtful that they will eventually come up with a machine that is as smart or even smarter than we are, it's only a matter of time.  The one thing we have that the machines might never have is consciousness, but it's hard to say because we still don't know a lot about the nature of our own consciousness.  It's like Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am, but I'm not so sure about the rest of you guys.", or words to that effect.

We assume that others are conscious, but we don't really know that for a fact.  We tend to project our consciousness into other entities because they seem to behave as if they were conscious.  We talk to our pets and even our machines because it helps us to relate to them.  The pets seem to respond to this in their own way, and even the machines are starting to act like sentient beings, if only because their creators deliberately design them to appear that way.  There is a difference, however, between acting conscious and really being conscious.  Or is there?  A machine can be programmed to say that it's conscious when it's not.  If we had a conscious machine, couldn't it also be programmed to deny that it's conscious?  For all we know, the line may have already been crossed and we just don't know it yet.

When we first learned about computers at the paper mill, if you pulled the plug on one you had to reload its personality when you started it back up.  Nowadays its memory is preserved during a power outage and, when you start the machine back up, it just starts where it left off.  Any unsaved data might be lost, but the machine does not totally lose its mind.  With my first computer, I had to load it before I could use it the first time, but every one since then has come right out of the box pre-loaded.  How cool is that?

When I bought my new pickup, I told the guy that I didn't want any of that fancy pantsy stuff like GPS and voice recognition, mostly to save money, but also because I thought I would never use it.  The one thing I did want was a CD player, but they no longer come with one of those.  It has taken me awhile, but I finally found out that I can plug a portable unit into my sound system, or at least I could if it had an old fashioned auxiliary input jack.   Some models come with them, but mine did not, so now I have to see if I can get one installed after the fact.  And so it goes.