Self-Awareness, a Singularity of AI

Abstract

Self-awareness, or self-consciousness, refers to reflective recognition of the existence of “subjective-self”. Every person has a subjective-self from which the person observes and interacts with the world. In this article, we argue that self-consciousness is an enigmatic phenomenon unique in human intelligence. Unlike many other intelligent and conscious capabilities, self-consciousness is not possible to be achieved in electronic computers and robots. Self-consciousness is an odd-point of human intelligence and a singularity of artificial intelligence (AI). Man-made intelligence through software is not capable of self-consciousness; therefore, robots will never become a newly created species. Because of the lack of self-awareness, AI software, such as Watson, Alpha-zero, ChatGPT, and PaLM, will remain a tool of humans and will not dominate the human society no matter how smart it is. This singularity of AI makes us re-think humbly what the future AI is like, what kind of robots we are going to deal with, and the blessing and threat of AI on humanity.