Measuring Machine Consciousness

In Can Machines Be Conscious?, Christof Koch and Giulio Tononi provide supporting evidence that consciousness does not require “many of the things we associate most deeply with being human: emotions, memory, self-reflection, language, sensing the world, and acting in it.”

The authors also propose a new type of Turing Test to measure machine intelligence:

So this is how we can test for machine consciousness: show it a picture and ask it for a concise description [see photos, “A Better Turing Test”]. The machine should be able to extract the gist of the image (it’s a liquor store) and what’s happening (it’s a robbery). The machine should also be able to describe which objects are in the picture and which are not (where’s the getaway car?), as well as the spatial relationships among the objects (the robber is holding a gun) and the causal relationships (the other man is holding up his hands because the bad guy is pointing a gun at him).

The machine would have to do as well as any of us to be considered as conscious as we humans are—so that a human judge could not tell the difference—and not only for the robbery scene but for any and all other scenes presented to it.

(Can Machines Be Conscious?)

This is very interesting. Of course, the machine would have to be able to support language understanding and generation to communicate its interpretation of the image.

The test also seems to require solving of the computer vision problem. I am not sure that that is necessary though. I am thinking this test could be performed entirely text based:

The user would describe a scene to the machine. The machine’s task would again be to provide a meaningful interpretation of the scene, given the description. A vague description should result in useful follow-up questions by the machine. Personalization and/or preference technology would need to be used to provide results most appropriate for the user’s background knowledge and expectations.

Is there a compelling reason that necessitates solving of the vision problem here?