Is Anyone Home? A Way to Find Out If AI Has Become Self-Aware

Recent articles by Schneider and Turner (Turner and Schneider, 2017; Schneider and Turner, 2017) outline an artificial consciousness test (ACT); a new, purely behavioural process to probe subjective experience (“phenomenal consciousness”: tickles, pains, visual experiences, and so on) in machines; work that has already resulted in a provisional patent application from Princeton University (Turner and Schneider, in press). In light of the author’s generic skepticism of “consciousness qua computation” (Bishop, 2002, 2009) and Tononi and Koch’s “Integrated Information Theory”-driven skepticism regarding the possibility of consciousness arising in any classical digital computer (due to low φmax) (Tononi and Koch, 2015), consideration is given to the claimed sufficiency of ACT to determine the phenomenal status of a computational artificial intelligence (AI) system.