We are rapidly approaching the time when we will have to take seriously the possibility that
such technological contrivances as computers, automated personal assistants, and, most relevant
to the present volume, robots have become conscious in the sense that things seem to them a
certain way. For instance, we may soon find ourselves wondering: When my robot looks at a
red tomato, does it see the distinctive quality that I see? Does it look red to it? And if my robot is
damaged, does it feel pain? Does it hurt? From Asimov’s Robot novels (which introduced the term
‘robotics’), to Star Trek and Terminator, these issues have been treated at length in science fiction,
but more often than not the robots involved, whether R. Daneel, Data, or the T-800, are either
devoid of real experience or claim to only have something going on in them not unlike a genu-
ine human experience—for instance, they might have something that could be called pain. But
what we want to know is whether they really do (or could) feel pain, see red, or what have you.
Nor are such questions a matter of idle philosophical curiosity. Our beliefs about whether or
not our robotic (or other) contrivances are conscious will impact how we ought to treat them.
We may view them with less concern, or none at all, if we think they feel nothing: no pain, no
distress at being bound, and no anguish at the prospect of deactivation. However sophisticated
they become, we might also deny them anything in the way of rights.^1 And if they feel noth-
ing, it could have practical ramifications for how they treat us. If robots are, so to speak, dead
inside, they will experience no empathic understanding or concern, which, on a good day,
constrains our treatment of one another. To keep robots from doing us harm, they may thus have
to be bound by internal safeguards akin to Asimov’s inviolable first law of robotics (do no harm
to humans).
Consensus in science and philosophy is scarce at best, and with regard to the general question
of whether (and if so, how) robots could become conscious in the above sense, we are as far from
it as ever. Nevertheless, the many views on the matter cluster around one or another of several
influential schools of thought, covered here. First, however, we should consider a few views on
how, if at all, biological mechanisms produce consciousness.1 The (Im-)Possibility of Conscious Machines from Galileo to McGinn
Galileo (1618/1957) was perhaps the first modern figure to assert, against the prevailing
orthodoxy of his day, that some qualities of conscious perceptual experience, such as tastes,30
ROBOT CONSCIOUSNESS
Jonathan Waskan
Jonathan Waskan Robot Consciousness