Towards Minimally Conscious Cyber-Physical Systems: A Manifesto

Abstract

Incidents like the crash of Lion Air Flight 610 in 2018 challenge the design of reliable and secure cyber-physical systems that operate in the real-world and have to cope with unpredictable external phenomena and error-prone technology. We argue that their design needs to guarantee minimal machine consciousness, which expresses that these systems must operate with full awareness of (the state of) their components and the environment. The concept emerged from our recent effort to develop a computational model for conscious behavior in robots, based on the theory of automata. Making systems ‘minimal machine conscious’ leads to more trustworthy systems, as it strengthens their behavioral flexibility in varying environments and their resilience to operation and cooperation failures of their components and as a whole. The notion of minimal machine consciousness has the potential to become one of the defining attributes of Industry 4.0.