Consciousness for artificial intelligence? Insert brain with soul here.

8th February 2017

The field of artificial intelligence(A.I) is re-surging and gaining a lot of attention lately. Most of the big tech titans such Google, Baidu, Microsoft and Amazon are hiring engineers to improve their products offering to include A.I.

Seems that many recent startups or even one person development studios are jumping into the A.I and machine learning (M.L) bandwagon. Maybe, just by coating the entity with the Artificial Intelligence label somehow will get people to pay attention and buy?

Even governments are throwing in funding and supports for those interested in A.I to develop their products such as SGInnovate in Singapore.

Majority of the developments done so far for A.I are basically .... replicating the human(or animals) sense organs.... such as eyes(camera) for computer vision, arms(robotics) to manipulate the surrounding objects, ears(microphone) for speech recognition and mouth(speakers) for replying intelligently. Unfortunately, not much for replicating the tongue for dealing with olfactory.

To replicate the thinking/reasoning part, A.I developers focus on the neutral networks. For example, Convolutional Neural Network for Visual Recognition of patterns and objects. By showing a computer certain image...a computer program will be able to tell if the image is a car, tree or the person is sad or happy.

However, all these incoming signals from the artificial sense organs need to be tied together with a "central computer" a.k.a the brain. Today, science has confirmed that the brain is where all the neurons are directed to and also where human consciousness is located.

For artificial intelligence:

The "artificial sense organs" such camera and microphone feed the brain with data, couple of neutral networks interpret the data and fire a series of predefined actions. For example, VIV( http://viv.ai ) is capable of interpreting human voices and then do something about it without question.

For human intelligence:

Our sense organs feed the brain with data constantly even when we are asleep or awake. We will try to understand(reason) the data first and whatever happen next depends on our consciousness. Our consciousness might influence the outcome. Such as :

Ignoring the data or request because of bad past experience dealing the the person or just too lazy/tired.
Do it willingly because of happiness and trust or fear of repercussion.
Reply with a better suggestion or give misleading answer unintentionally.
Play dumb because of mistrust or give wrong result intentionally simply because we are just plain nasty people.

What set artificial intelligence to human intelligence apart is : consciousness.

The holy grail of A.I is to develop a machine based consciousness. Can this be achieved?

I believe that one of the prerequisites for consciousness to exist is to have a soul first. Soul gives birth to consciousness and from there reasoning.

Simply put :

No soul = no consciousness.

A soul cannot be measured, cannot be cut, combined, multiplied and stored. Only in movies that you get to see a soul can be downloaded into a machine. In real life, if you cannot measure the soul ... how the heck you can show a progressive download/upload indicator??

Can the soul and consciousness be replicated?

Fake it with neural nets, yes. Actual reasoning that is almost 100% human like.... doubt so.

In the Ghost In The Shell animation, the authors recognized that even in the future, despite all the technological advances ... you still need a brain to store the soul and breathe consciousness into an artificial human body.

Summary:

So far, computer scientists still working toward this goal and progress is made. Some had voiced their fear of A.I gaining "singularity" status and will pose a threat to humanity. Is this fear founded? Pretty sure A.I is capable of doing both good and evil if A.I do gain consciousness or acquire a soul one day. After all, humanity is capable of doing good and evil. That is why humanity need moral/religious values to guide us away from doing "crazy" things.

Only time will tell.