HORIZONS

The vision of conscious robots coexisting with humans has remained a science fiction fantasy as in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels. Current AI, from machine learning to computer vision and language processing, has only been able to produce virtual systems and robots that remain completely cut from fundamental steps of early human mental development. Clinical assessments would see them at best as deeply autistic systems, incapable of showing this capacity for mental reciprocity that characterizes humans and their social relationships. 

Based on a new scientific formal understanding of human consciousness that we have been pursuing in a multidisciplinary way, we will design, implement, test, and market virtual systems and robots, following a completely different road to strong AI. They will be capable for the first time of true empathy, imagination, emotion and social perspective taking. They will relate to each other and to humans, and we will relate to them, as we do among ourselves, because they will be governed by the same fundamental mechanisms that govern human, embodied consciousness. 

Based on scientific principles, implementations, proofs-of-concept and code we have already produced, we are implementing an Artificial Consciousness (AC), starting from a kernel capturing the fundamental structure and dynamics of subjectivity, as a cybernetic process for the control of autonomous systems. We will extend it to integrate deep autobiographical memory, sophisticated emotional mechanisms, and advanced executive functions, including language. We are implementing interfaces with virtual humans and robotic platforms. We use methodologies of assessment for artificial minds, which will offer a new standard to assess the level of mental development and social abilities of AI and robots from a child developmental perspective, based on our Asimov Test for user experience assessment. 

Our creations will lead to a paradigm shift affecting science and technology, transforming society, by bringing machines with human-like consciousness into the world. It will break current boundaries in AI and robotic, and deliver generations of machines that will represent a giant leap and a new dawn for humanity, making science fiction visions dreamt by generations of humans a reality.