Robots May Have Just Woken Up

For AI to take over the world, it has to make its own choices. It has to become self aware. 

This hasn't happened, though it sure seems like it. Text back and forth with Chat GPT, it feels like you're talking with another person -- albeit someone with an impossibly comprehensive answer to anything you ask in seconds. As we wrote previously, Chat GPT passed a version of the Turing test -- it can seem so much like a real person, it can fool you into thinking it is.

But it isn't. AI is not self aware. It's a machine following instructions. It only responds to what you say. And it can only respond using data it was trained on. When that data is the entire internet, it can blow your mind. But it's a machine just the same.

It's the reason there is no robot that can do our dishes. You know Amazon is dying to sell you one. And in a controlled environment, they could build one right now. A robot could be programmed to recognize a dish, pick it up, apply soap, and place it in a dishwasher. So what's the problem? 

The real world is a lot more complex. The real world has curve balls. Unexpected events happen constantly. The dish soap is empty. A fork fell in the disposal. There's a baby crawling underfoot. You could come up with 100 examples and pre program them all into your robot and example 101 would happen and end the whole experiment.

Humans have no problem with curve balls. To paraphrase a Best Picture winner, we are aware of everything around us all at once. If a baby crawls by while we're doing the dishes, we easily shift focus and put the dishes down and gently pick it up the kid. The dishes can wait.

Simply put, humans are conscious. AI is not. But science is working hard to bring human-level awareness to AI. And Amazon's founder Jeff Bezos is making sure he doesn't miss it when it happens. Last month (in April of 2025) at Bezos's invite-only MARS conference for top scientists and genius innovators, a new company called Nirvanic Consciousness Technologies demonstrated how close we might be to turning on the mysterious light of consciousness in your average robot.

The company thinks the answer might lie in quantum computers.

The idea is not new. For much of the 20th century, scientists compared the mystery of human consciousness with the strange behavior of particles described in quantum mechanics. In the 1990s, two scientists -- Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff - proposed that this was more than a coincidence; they suggested our brains were actually making computations at the quantum level in tiny structural components called microtubules. For these scientists, the human brain is not just similar to a quantum computer, it is one.

Nirvanic Consciousness Technologies decided to test this in the real world. They hooked a robot up to an actual quantum computer.

And it worked.

If you watched their demonstration at the MARS event, you might not be that impressed. On stage, a cat-sized robot with four legs moved around in different directions, and made a few different motions. So what? We've seen robots do backflips.

But it wasn't what the robot was doing that was so impressive. It was how. 

The robot - named Kit Kat - was not pre-programmed to do any of those moves. It was sending webcam images to a D-Wave quantum computer across the country, at the speed of two times every second. The images were turned into quantum wave functions and then collapsed back into bits and turned into a single action command, which was sent back to the robot. Simply put, the quantum computer took in everything the robot was seeing and made an autonomous, independent decision what to do next. It was like having a quantum computer for a brain. That cute robot on stage was making purposeful decisions.

If this were a sequel to Robocop, one of the actions would have been to gun down the entire conference. But Kit Kat only had 32 possible actions in this experiment. No one was in any mortal danger. 

The question now: does the quantum computer demonstrate any unique decision patterns different than a classic robot with traditional pre programmed choices? The brilliant minds over at Nirvanic Consciousness Technologies have a hunch it will. They believe the larger awareness of a quantum computer, which can see things in every state all it once, will replicate that mysterious spark of life we call consciousness.

We don't know why we're aware of who we are, or how we know we exist.

But we may have just woken up the robots, so they can wonder too.