[In the Media] Avvenire: Ideas. Every intelligence (artificial and otherwise) requires ethics

04 June 2023

The EMERGE Project and the theme of artificial agents awareness is analysed and debated by Vincenzo Ambriola in a recent opinion article in the Italian newspaper Avvenire.

---

"In 2021, in the context of the Horizon Europe programme, the European Innovation Council opened a call called 'Pathfinder challenge' structured in five challenges, ensuring support for the exploration of strong ideas for radically innovative technologies. The topic of the consciousness of artificial entities and their interaction with humans was the focus of one of these challenges, 'Awareness inside'. In particular, research proposals were called for that could define new concepts of awareness applicable to non-human systems, including technological ones, with implications on how awareness could be recognised or measured. In addition to this, it was requested to demonstrate and validate the role and added value of a broad class of awareness products and services for which awareness characteristics may exhibit substantially different quality characteristics in terms of, for example, performance, flexibility, reliability or user experience. Of all the proposals submitted in response to the call, 39 were selected and funded, of which eight related to the artificial consciousness challenge. One of these relates to the Emerge project, led by Davide Bacciu of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Pisa, which aims to study how consciousness emerges spontaneously in a group of artificial entities working together to achieve certain goals."

---

Read more below (in Italian).