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

[Aoi Magi]

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.

I disagree with that also.     I think at its core self awareness is a preset tendency to organize both preprogrammed and learned information in a specific way, and use those information to solve problems in a specific way.   So the lynchpin of self awareness is the hardware or firmware rather than the information.    I can not see how any amount of information will necessitate or encourage the framing of any problem in the context of self if the hardware or firmware is not already there.   So a machine can’t learn its way to self awareness unless it already been given extensive wiring configured to frame problem in the context of self.

Then you misunderstand, any AI setup will not become self-aware if it has no room for adapting to face unspecified problems and situations. if it can only solve one specific problem or even only a fixed subset of problems, it can't reach the level of AGI and can't be self-aware in the sense of a conscious being. In order to reach AGI level, the "pre-programmed" part of it will have to enable it to work in non-predefined situations. Also, algorithms are not entirely dependent on hardware.