ASTOUND

Creating AI with human-like consciousness and empathy using attention schema theory.

Creating consciousness is one of the most significant challenges in AI, a field that has been advancing rapidly in the past decade. There is still a long way to go before machines can match human-like abilities in consciousness and social cognition. The EU-funded ASTOUND project aims to establish consciousness in machines. The project’s AI architecture for artificial consciousness is based on the attention schema theory. It suggests that the brain constructs subjective awareness as a schematic model of attention, and machines can attribute consciousness properties to others similarly. Overall, ASTOUND aims to create a virtual conversational agent that can understand natural language with greater accuracy and empathetic decision-making.