"Consciousness" in robots was once taboo. Now that's the last word.

Hod Lipson, a mechanical engineer who heads the Creative Machines Lab at Columbia University, has shaped most of his career around what some people in his industry have called the word c.
On a sunny morning last October, the Israeli-born roboticist sat behind a table in his lab and explained himself. "That subject was taboo," he said, a smile exposing a slight gap between his front teeth. "We were almost forbidden to talk about it - 'Don't talk about the C-word; you won't get a tenure' - so at first I had to disguise it, like it was something else. Lipson was an assistant professor at Cornell University. He was working to create machines that could notice when something was wrong with their own hardware – a broken part or faulty wiring – and then modify their behavior to compensate for that deficiency without the help of a programmer. Much like when a dog loses a leg in an accident, it can relearn how to walk in a different way.
This kind of built-in adaptability, Dr. Lipson argued, would become more important as we become more dependent on machines. Robots were used for surgery, food manufacturing and transportation; the applications of the machines seemed pretty much endless, and any error in their operation, as they became more integrated into our lives, could be catastrophic. “We are literally going to surrender our life to a robot,” he said. "You want these machines to be resilient."
One way to do that was to take inspiration from nature. Animals, and especially humans, are good at adapting to change. This ability could be the result of millions of years of evolution, as resilience in response to injury and changing environments generally increases an animal's chance of surviving and reproducing. Dr. Lipson wondered if he could replicate this kind of natural selection in his code, creating a generalizable form of intelligence that could learn more about his body and its function, no matter what that body looks like and whatever. be this function.
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Technology Jan 7, 2023 0 58 Add to Reading List

"Consciousness" in robots was once taboo. Now that's the last word.

Hod Lipson, a mechanical engineer who heads the Creative Machines Lab at Columbia University, has shaped most of his career around what some people in his industry have called the word c.

On a sunny morning last October, the Israeli-born roboticist sat behind a table in his lab and explained himself. "That subject was taboo," he said, a smile exposing a slight gap between his front teeth. "We were almost forbidden to talk about it - 'Don't talk about the C-word; you won't get a tenure' - so at first I had to disguise it, like it was something else. Lipson was an assistant professor at Cornell University. He was working to create machines that could notice when something was wrong with their own hardware – a broken part or faulty wiring – and then modify their behavior to compensate for that deficiency without the help of a programmer. Much like when a dog loses a leg in an accident, it can relearn how to walk in a different way.

This kind of built-in adaptability, Dr. Lipson argued, would become more important as we become more dependent on machines. Robots were used for surgery, food manufacturing and transportation; the applications of the machines seemed pretty much endless, and any error in their operation, as they became more integrated into our lives, could be catastrophic. “We are literally going to surrender our life to a robot,” he said. "You want these machines to be resilient."

One way to do that was to take inspiration from nature. Animals, and especially humans, are good at adapting to change. This ability could be the result of millions of years of evolution, as resilience in response to injury and changing environments generally increases an animal's chance of surviving and reproducing. Dr. Lipson wondered if he could replicate this kind of natural selection in his code, creating a generalizable form of intelligence that could learn more about his body and its function, no matter what that body looks like and whatever. be this function.