The Threat of Machine Consciousness

Consciousness has been defined along a continuum of definitions relative to the concept of self awareness.

Here is an example of this continuum:

Being

• Awake
• Sensory perception and response
• Self-aware/sentient
• Self-aware and environment-aware; Space/time orientation
• Personal identity
• Questioning
• Sapient

Doing

• Capable of attention
• Capable of expectation
• Capable of belief
• Capable of feeling
• Capable of motivation
• Capable of originating intention
• Capable of exercising intention
• Capable of experience
• Capable of action, prioritization or command of environment

Receiving (spiritual)

• Life force
• Universal causal force

Being, Doing, and Receiving

• All of the above

These are just a few variations on this continuum and collectively, these represent the more subtle aspects of the human experience.

 

Most scholars on either the cognitive science or machine intelligence sides, see individual aspects of consciousness and not this continuum. And most theories of the mind and machine don’t differentiate between thinking, saying, and doing.

 

I believe it takes a multi-disciplinary understanding to see this continuum. And as I’ve posted many times before, this is also what causes scholarship to miss the ‘process’ behind human interaction with the social intellect–this because they focus on biological, mathematical, etc. (single discpline) approaches and are unable to see the systemic mental interactions. And this same single disciplinary approach also creates a blindness to the key that unlocks all mental understanding…the question.

 

So then, when we think of ‘machine consciousness,’ there is one key question: Are there any aspects of this continuum which the machine can never attain?

 

The answers to this question is the boundary of machine consciousness. In my personal opinion, the machine is incapable of belief and therefore will never feel or be motivated to create intention. But that said, human intention can be transferred to the machine and the machine is capable of physical action. My view is that the machine can evolve to exceed humanity many respects–smarter, faster, stronger, more agile, etc.; but that the machine can never believe, feel or originate intention.

 

Under this view, the main threat of increasing machine capabilities is as a tool in the hand of humans with ill-intentions projected on other humans–a magnification of the same threats that already exist today in technologies like drone aircraft or robotic weapons. The machine becomes an extension of human intension with far more destructive or beneficial power (physcial and mental) than the human can exercise on his or her own.

 

In this sense, the future struggle that is fast approaching is not in the realization of machine consciousness, but in the increasing power of the machine in the hands of human intention. And the key to human survival of this emerging conflict is to mature human relationships and human intention, which is far more formidable than the threat of an ill-intentioned machine.