Consciousness, Artificial Intelligence, and Automatic Transmissions

Strong artificial intelligence (AI) posits that it is theoretically possible for a digital computer to mimic human consciousness. One of the notions that I have tried to support previously is the idea that consciousness is wakefulness and content. Wakefulness is the ability to gather information from the external and internal environment. Content is the amount of information that we access. If consciousness is truly nothing above and beyond wakefulness and content, then it stands to reason that computers can be conscious provided that they are powerful enough to meet those access and content criteria. On the other hand, the problems that automotive engineers have encountered with the newer automatic transmissions suggests that strong AI may, in fact, not be possible because no non-biologically based material can contain enough information to support consciousness.

Modern automatic dual clutch transmissions have a computer that gathers information from the driving environment and uses that informational content to mimic the activity of a live driver changing gears manually. None of these systems, however, have been able to mimic consistently what a conscious driver does. This shortcoming is directly related to the fact that computers cannot access enough information to mimic a conscious person shifting gears manually.

For those of you who are not familiar with the engineering of dual clutch transmission, I will briefly review what you need to know for my purposes here. These devices are basically manual transmission in which the clutch and gear changes are controlled by a computer rather than by the vehicle's operator. There is no need for a clutch pedal or for rowing the gear shifter by hand. They are called dual clutch transmission because they have two clutches rather than a single clutch as in the manual transmission that we have been familiar with for more than a century.

All the major manufacturers have had varying degrees of success with these new transmissions. Just check on the internet, if you are interested in the specifics. The one problem that I will focus on, is the fact that these transmissions take a long time hunting for the correct gear and that they are not infrequently mistaken about which gear to choose. This results in uncontrolled engine revving, sloppy shifts, near stalling, difficulty accelerating, and clunking noises as the car gets into the wrong gear for a given situation. These drivability features have been described as mimicking a manual transmission that is operated by an inexperienced driver. I would say that it is more accurate to describe the car as acting as if it were being driven by a driver with a depressed level of consciousness.

There are certain situations in which these transmissions behave well. For example, if you are accelerating linearly on a highway or drag strip, the transmissions are generally flawless and much better than a true manual. Where problems begin is at slow speeds, in traffic, or when slowing down abruptly. This is in part because the information necessary for accurate shifting under these conditions increases exponentially. To keep the argument simple, let us think about only one piece of obvious information available to a driver that is not available to an onboard computer: visual information. A driver can see the road situation far ahead and might decide to change from 6th gear directly to 2nd gear, based on what he sees. A computer "decides" to change gears based mostly on the motion of the car. The computer, therefore, only reacts to the limited information it receives, while the driver can be described as having the ability to plan, based on a lot more incoming information. Consciousness is required to have this planning ability, because only a conscious state contains enough information to support planning. You might have any number of counter arguments to this position. You could, for example, add a camera to our onboard computer, add more gears to the transmission, etc. This would get you closer to conscious action and smoother shifting. But would it be possible to add enough content to control the car as well as a person could? I will say, no, for the following reason.

How you operate your car will depend, among many other things, on how you feel at a particular moment. If you are feeling elated you might drive and shift differently than if you were feeling like a Sunday driver. The feel of your mood contains so much information, from past experiences, present events, future prospects etc. that containing it in the space of a silicon-based digital computer is not conceivable to me, at least. The major problems that engineers have encountered with a relatively simple task like changing gears, is a small example illustrating that the much larger goal of strong artificial intelligence may be a pipe dream, because creating conscious computers in a structurally fixed architecture seems an impossible task, outside the realm of a biologically based informational system.