Can Machines Be Conscious?

Sebastian Sunday Grève and Yu Xiaoyue find an unexpected way in which the answer is 'yes'.

- Sebastian Sunday Grève and Yu Xiaoyue

Alan Turing thought that it was possible (at least in theory) to make machines that enjoyed strawberries and cream, that British summer favourite. From this we can infer that he also thought it was possible (again, at least in theory) to make machines that were conscious. For you cannot really enjoy strawberries and cream if you are not conscious – or can you? In any case, Turing was very explicit that he thought machines could be conscious. He did not, however, think it likely that such machines were going to be made any time soon. Not because he considered the task particularly difficult, but because he did not think it worth the effort: “Possibly a machine might be made to enjoy this delicious dish, but any attempt to make one do so would be idiotic,” he wrote in his influential ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’. He added that even mentioning this likely inability to enjoy strawberries and cream may have struck his readers as frivolous. He explains: thus reminding us, as he was wont to do, that humans have always found it difficult to accept some other individuals even within their own species as being of equal ability or worth. So he says that the importance of machines likely being unable to enjoy strawberries and cream resides in this being an example of a broader inability on the part of machines to share certain elements of human life.

“What is important about this disability is that it contributes to some of the other disabilities, e.g. to the difficulty of the same kind of friendliness occurring between man and machine as between white man and white man, or between black man and black man,”