- seCtIon FoUR: eVoLUtIon
agreed on precisely which functions were the essential ones (which they have not
yet done), and designed a test accordingly, the believer in zombies would reject
it. Once again (see Chapter 2), believing in zombies seems to lead to an impasse.
Given these difficulties, it might seem impossible to make any progress with
the question of machine consciousness, but we should not give up so easily. We
may be sure that better and cleverer machines will continue to be built, and that
people will keep arguing about whether they are conscious. Even Prinz’s (2003)
mysterianism is no cause to be defeatist. He urges engineers to keep trying to
model minds and learn more about how they work without fooling themselves
into thinking they can definitely create conscious machines.
Does it matter? Well, aside from the intellectual quest, there is the problem of
suffering – the same problem we faced when thinking about other animals. If
machines were conscious, then they could suffer and we, their creators, might
need to take some responsibility. This is one of the issues tackled by the field of
robot ethics, or roboethics (e.g. Lin, Abney, and Bekey, 2011). Thomas Metzinger
asks, ‘Should we really try to build conscious machines before we have under-
stood why our own form of subjective experience is accompanied by so much
suffering?’ (2000, p. 8). Discussing his notion of the phenomenal self model (PSM,
Chapter 16), he even suggests that ‘we should ban all attempts to create (or even
risk the creation of ) artificial and postbiotic [partly biological] PSMs from serious
academic research’ (2003, p. 622). Futurist Ray Kurzweil agrees that the debate
over conscious machines lies at the heart of society’s legal and moral foundations:
‘The debate will change’, he argues,
when a machine – nonbiological intelligence – can persuasively argue on
its own that it/he/she has feelings that need to be respected. Once it can
do so with a sense of humor [. . .] it is likely that the debate will be won.
(2005, p. 379)Some dismiss the problem, including Susan Greenfield, who thinks us managing
to create machine consciousness is ‘so unlikely [. . .] it’s like arguing angels on the
head of a pin’. If a robot were sent into a burning building to save a person, she
would not worry for the robot’s sake, ‘not for a nanosecond’ (in Blackmore, 2005,
p. 98). Others are already making plans for dealing with it. For example, in 2007
South Korea began drawing up a Robot Ethics Charter to protect robots from
humans and vice versa, and in 2016 the British Standards Institute issued a ‘Guide
to the ethical design and application of robots and robotic systems’.In the next section, we will consider some arguments against the possibility of
machine consciousness, and in the final section explore ways of making a con-
scious machine.CONSCIOUS MACHINES ARE IMPOSSIBLE
There are several plausible – and not so plausible – ways to argue that machines
could never be conscious. Some draw on our intuitions about living things and
the nature of awareness, and those intuitions can be at once powerful and wrong.
It is therefore worth exploring your own intuitions. You may find that some are
valuable thinking tools, while others, once exposed, look daft. You may decide