There might be something going on here… or not.

Researchers from Columbia Engineering are trying to “explain away” consciousness with a robot designed to answer the question: Can a robot create a self-model with no prior knowledge?

They chose a physical robot with four coupled degrees of freedom and able to record action-sensation pairs by moving through 1,000 random trajectories

This step is not unlike a babbling baby observing its hands.

They used deep learning to train a self-model from scratch, very much in line with what DeepMind did with AlphaGO. In the video, you can see the robot performance on two separate tasks: a pick-and-place task and a handwriting task.

Now their creators are dreaming of more elevated endeavours:

Self-imaging will be key to allowing robots to move away from the confinements of so-called narrow AI toward more general abilities. We conjecture that this separation of self and task may have also been the evolutionary origin of self-awareness in humans.

Let’s stay tuned.

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(1) Kwiatkowski, Robert, and Hod Lipson. ‘Task-Agnostic Self-Modeling Machines’. Science Robotics, vol. 4, no. 26, Jan. 2019, p. eaau9354. robotics.sciencemag.org, doi:10.1126/scirobotics.aau9354.