Can machines ever be sentient? Could they perceive and feel things, be conscious of their surroundings? What are the prospects of achieving sentience in a machine? What are the dangers associated with such an endeavor, and is it even ethical to embark on such a path to begin with? In the series of articles of this column, I discuss one possible path toward “general intelligence” in machines: to use the process of Darwinian evolution to produce artificial brains that can be grafted onto mobile robotic platforms, with the goal of achieving fully embodied sentient machines.
After reviewing the history of Artificial Intelligence research (Adami, 2021) and discussing the components, topology, and optimization methods used in artificial neural network research (Adami, 2022), we now take a step back to ask ourselves, What is intelligence? In our quest to evolve an intelligent system, this is not an idle question. In...