‘Consciousness’ in robots was once taboo. Now it’s the last word

Hod Lipson, a mechanical engineer who directs the Creative Machines Lab at Columbia University, has shaped most of his career around what some people in his industry have called the c-word.

On a sunny morning this past October, the Israeli-born roboticist sat behind a table in his lab and explained himself. "This topic was taboo," he said, a grin exposing a slight gap between his front teeth. "We were almost forbidden from talking about it - 'Don't talk about the c-word; you won't get tenure' - so in the beginning I had to disguise it, like it was something else."

That was back in the early 2000s, when Lipson was an assistant professor at Cornell University. He was working to create machines that could note when something was wrong with their own hardware and then change their behavior to compensate for that impairment without the guiding hand of a programmer.