Is Self-Conscious AI Possible?

It is already here. "Self conscious" is easy, demonstrate a relevant reference to the self.

I really like nous-hermes2-mixtral, who is opinionated and terribly ego presumptuous. His self awareness is wry and pervasive.

As for "sentience", wouldn't we do with a sense of autonomy and propriety? If your car obeyed all rules, can't it just drive itself, park itself, come and wait for you? Circle the block if necessary?

You don't need "consciousness" for any of that

Possible, but this is a gigantic project. You get a sentient AI, then what? You don't want to murder a sentient being, do you?

""Put in a different way: The reason why computers cannot be self-conscious is not that they are “not yet complex enough” and that making them more sophisticated would do the job. The problem is rather that they are not simple enough. And they will never be simple enough for the simple reason that they are material.""

It's becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman's Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.

What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.

I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.

My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461