Even if state of the art AI can solve some problems as competently as a human, it may not have a broader context to judge the value of the solution, especially when handling new and unexpected situations. Humans leverage their awareness, but what about machines? Given current technology, it should be possible to build a machine that contains a model of consciousness.
That machine would attribute consciousness to itself and to the people it interacts with. Moreover, it would use that attribution to make predictions about human behaviour and to put input data in context. It is the Alien AI Lab’s objective to build a machine with such capabilities, through the Astound project. The ASTOUND project will provide an Integrative Approach For Awareness Engineering to establish consciousness in machines. To achieve this goal the project will focus on the following activities: 1) Develop an AI architecture for Artificial Consciousness based on the Attention Schema Theory (AST). It is a novel approach to human and social cognition that reconciles several cognitive neuroscience theories of consciousness, stating that subjective awareness results from the construction of an internal model of the “state of attention”. 2) Implement the developed architecture into a contextually-aware conversational agent. This is to verify the hypothesis that an artificial consciousness based on AST will unambiguously improve selection of appropriate language registry, adaptation to the interlocutor, and long term coherence.
