The surer we are that machines can think, the less sure we’ll be about people

Having written (for a Times diary) a few sentences about consciousness in robots, I settled back to study readers’ responses in the online commentary section. They added little. I was claiming there had been no progress since Descartes and Berkeley in the classic philosophical debate about how we know ‘Other Minds’ exist; and that there never would be. A correspondent on the letters page referred me to Wittgenstein’s treatment of the subject and so I studied his remarks. I have to confess they are, to me, unintelligible.

But I cannot let the matter rest. My earlier thoughts had been prompted by newspaper reports of the adventures of a talking, hitchhiking Canadian robot called Hitchbot. Every time such a ‘Whatever will robots learn to do next?’ story gets a public airing, we go the rounds of the same old discussion — a discussion that started in earnest in the 20th century: the debate about whether a machine could ever be so clever and responsive that we might call it ‘conscious’ in the sense we humans think we ourselves are conscious.