Yale Creates First Self-Aware Robot?

This is really just a robot built to pass a specific test. This isn't that different from robot programmed to say "I'm aware and am aware of my own awareness." Don't confuse a useful proxy test with genuine self-awareness.

Business as usual, nothing to see here.

Nico is a really great robot. Scaz's general approach there is interesting - instead of trying to make a robot that is intelligent by whatever means, he's generally trying to use our best models of humans to make a robot work, to test those models and find out more about humans.

So for example, he would implement eye tracking by looking at visual light, rather than the much easier infra-red, because that's how humans do it.

If recognizing oneself in a mirror is what interests you, then this robot has it.

If modeling oneself formally is what interests you, then a quined Lisp program has it.

If successfully pretending to be human, showing emotion, acting irrationally, winning at chess, is what interest you, then some of today's AIs have it.

First define what you are looking for in this context -- then check if an AI has it.

Why do we think that recognizing oneself in the mirror is strong evidence of self-awareness?

Nico is self-aware to the degree that a man born blind is not self-aware, according to this test.

Self awareness has been defined as being aware of your own awareness. This test shows whether or not the subject is aware of the correlation between its body and the image in the mirror. It's not entirely clear what "awareness" is, but it's clearly in no way related to the correlation between your body and the image in a mirror. You'd have to be aware of your physical self to do it, but not your mental self.

It's a puzzle. It measures intelligence just like any other puzzle. Calling what it measures "self-awareness" is little more than a pun.

It occurs to me, one of the best possible things that can happen here is if the first self-aware AI is in a robot, and not too too smart. Why?

We would expect that such a robot be social, in ways that we wouldn't demand of a server rack. This would more readily expose any unfriendly elements of its programming (and unless the problem is a whole lot easier than it seems, there will be some).

So far, robots have been given the benefit of the doubt because they're obviously complicated appliances. Once that no longer applies - once it's past 'Wow, you're really good at imitating a person' and into 'Do I like you' territory - then we will naturally begin applying different standards to them.

On the other hand, it could be that friendliness sufficient for such limited AIs does nothing for a superintelligence. Even so, I think that this would raise the profile of the problem, give it more mindshare, and generally help.

I don't believe it's self-awareness because I think awareness, whether raw or reflective, is only a property of certain special entities, like the infamous quantum monads.

However, even from a functionalist perspective, you shouldn't jump to the conclusion that this is self-awareness. The mirror test, like the Turing test, is a behavioral test, but self-awareness isn't a behavior, it's a cognitive capacity, and you really need to examine the detailed semantics and cause-and-effect of how the program produced the behavior, to see whether "self-awareness" had anything to do with it.

I think the self-awareness test is considered important because it's a big step in child development, but that doesn't mean it's very important in terms of intelligence. It doesn't seem to complicated to design a machine that can recognize itself, so this doesn't seem like much of an achievement.