[robbrown451]

This is cool.

I wonder with stuff like this, what happens if a self driving car is capable of processing reflections in glass windows? What if it sees a reflection of itself and is able to properly identify it as being itself? Does that make it self aware?

I'm being serious. People like to throw around terms like "self aware" with some assumption that it is a long way off, or impossible, to have a machine be self aware. But that would meet my definition. People will say "yeah but that's not what I mean." And I want to know what you actually mean, then.

[halflings]

Many robots already have cameras pointed at themselves. What does that change really?

[robbrown451]

Honestly nothing, to me. But other people think that ability to recognize oneself in a mirror is important.

To me the concept of self-awareness and consciousness is pretty much meaningless, especially if you are considering it something that machines don't have or can't have (or if they eventually do have it, we'll know).

The reason I mention it with this, and with self driving cars (which this particular system may not be fast or reliable for yet), is that for those people, it may register better because it seems more analogous to a human. With those robots you speak of, do they also recognize other robots? Do they have some sort of logic that knows that they are like those other robots in many ways, but in significant ways they are different (i.e. they have control over their own behavior but not over the others')?

The point is not that something particularly amazing is happening, the point is that it is getting easier to illustrate with real world examples that "self awareness" is not this magical thing we currently have no idea how it works.