When the AI wakes up the first thing it will do is...

[Aoi Magi]

Self-awareness kind of necessitates an awareness and understanding of ones surroundings, and for an AI, that would be the digital world.

I don’t think so.  Self-awareness per se does mot necessitate anything other ability to a conceptualize self.   In that such ability does not pop out of quantum foam fully formed, it seem likely the ability to comceptualize self evolved because it aids in solving problems necessary for survival.   So self-awareness May be strongly correlated with a tendency to frame problems in the context of self.

Curiousity does not need self awareness, nor does self awareness need curiosity.   The only relationship between the two is self-awareness permits an awareness of the one’s own curiosity.

Yeh you are probably right about this, and honestly, I haven't given much thought to consciousness, but in my mind even if the consciousness exists in an absolute void, if it is not aware enough to distinguish itself from the void then it is not fully self-aware. But then again I probably shouldn't think about biological consciousness when thinking of AI.


Any AI system which has become self-aware, if we go by current AI design patterns, will be a self-learning system at its core as it needs to gather input and make sense of it without human intervention, and I don't think self-awareness can be achieved by training on a small fixed dataset, so the AI will have to be given access to a really huge data source, and at the moment the best way to do that is to give it access to the internet with possibly some controls in place. It won't really need a "motivation" to go through the internet, I think that'd be a part of its existence, and the need to seek out information is what it would start off with.