It’s often easy to find advances in robot technology a little bit unsettling. (If not downright scary!) Practically as long as man has been making machines, we’ve been worried that they’ll evolve and one day take over everything. Of course, for this to happen, the machines would need some sort of agency, a unique brand of intelligence that motivates them to fend for themselves. They’d need self-awareness.The idea of a self-aware robot was a pipe dream until recently, when a team of Yale computer scientists assembled a new breed of humanoid named Nico. Nico is just a few feet tall and unglamorous with all of his gears and wires hanging out. He has two arms, no legs and a set of goofy looking googly eyes attached to his head, where a Yale baseball cap is often perched. And according to his makers, Nico knows who he is.The litmus test for self-awareness in both robots and living creatures is a simple exercise involving a mirror and a marker. In testing the self-awareness of, say, a monkey, researchers would put the monkey in a room with the mirror and give it enough time to spot its reflection. They’d then take the monkey out of the room and mark its frontside with a colored dot, conspicuous enough that the animal would see it in the mirror. The monkey then goes back in the room with the mirror. If it inspects the colored dot, it’s believed to be self-aware, since it could recognize a change in its own physical appearance. Only a few animals, including chimpanzees and bottlenose dolphins, can pass the mirror test.For robots, this is a very difficult test. It requires sophisticated intelligence that scientists have had a hard time replicating in machines, but Nico’s creators think they’ve figured out a fix. They’ve basically programmed Nico with an advanced image processing program that can scan its field of view and spot any differences. The same technology could be applied not only to the mirror test but also certain self-preservation challenges. For instance, it the robot damages one of its parts, it would know it and also do what’s necessary to fix it. Nico’s creators are confident that Nico will pass the mirror test in the near future, making him the world’s first self-aware robot and opening up the field of robotics to the possibilities of more autonomous machines that could not only repair themselves but also self-replicate.Sure, it may seem like Nico is just designed to game the mirror test. But once the machines start multiplying, things are going to get real scary, real quick. In the meantime, we’ll just enjoy the days of stupid robot strippers and remote-controlled war machines while we can.Image via Yale
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