This episode of the radiolab podcast titled Furbidden Knowledge, features an interview with Freedom Baird a former graduate student at the MIT media lab. During the episode, Baird and hosts perform a so called ¨emotional turing test¨ on a group of 7 and 8 year olds. Presenting the children with a Barbie doll, a Furby and a real hamster, they take a look at how long the children are comfortable holding each one upside down.

While the children had no problem holding the Barbie doll upside down for an unlimited amount of time, and immediately felt very guilty holding the hamster upside down for just a few seconds, their interaction with the Furby was much more complicated… although they knew the Furby was just a toy they still felt a strange sort of guilt listening to it protest as they held it on its head.

The podcast also features some of MIT professor Sherry Turkle’s views on these issues as she discusses how machines are capable of pushing our ¨Darwinian buttons¨and Furby’s  creator  Caleb Chung  shares his views on what elements are necessary to foster long-term bonds between humans and machines.

When we look at the picture on the left, it’s obvious that something’s wrong with the picture on the bottom. The human brain’s capability to integrate knowledge is what allows us to recognize that  keyboards and computers fit well together while plants and computers… not so much.

Christof Koch, Cognitive and behavioural biology professor at the California Institute of Technology and Giulio Tononi, professor in consciousness science at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison, have explored the notion of consciousness and propose some simple tests that could be used to find out if a machine were truly conscious or not. 

What would these tests consist of? The Turing test is what’s commonly currently used to test the intelligence of machines. A person must judge whether they are communicating with another human or an intelligent machine via computer. To date, machines have been able to fool people during this test but after a certain point in the conversation it becomes clear to the human judge that what they are talking to is not made of flesh and blood.

Yet how could we test if a machine were ever truly conscious? In Scientific American’s A Test for Consciousness, Koch and Tononi propose the use of different types of tests which rely on a subject’s ability to perceive enormous amounts of integrated knowledge: simple puzzles. The image-analysis systems of today’s most intelligent machines, which are capable of identifying one specific face out of a million options, would be stumped when trying to choose the correct picture of the two seen above. Likewise, the placement of a few black strips on some pictures easily interferes with many image-analysis systems and renders today’s machines unable to pick out the matching portions of the pictures.

However, as machines are built more and more according to biological principles, Koch and Tononi maintain that one day machines will easily be able to pass such tests “and when they do they will share with us the gift of consciousness- the most enigmatic feature of the universe”.