Much in the vein of ancient times people asking Pythia about their future, I asked ChatGPT about our possibilities in the CORESENSE project to create machines capable of understanding their environment. This is what it said:

Me: Can a machine understand its environment?

ChatGPT: Whether a machine can understand its environment depends on its capabilities and design. Some machines, such as certain types of robots or artificial intelligence systems, are designed to gather and process information about their environment in order to make decisions and take actions. These machines may be able to build a model or representation of their environment and use this information to navigate and interact with it. However, the extent to which these machines can truly “understand” their environment is a complex and contentious topic that is not fully understood. Some argue that machines can only simulate understanding and do not have the same level of conscious awareness and comprehension as humans. Others believe that machines can achieve true understanding through advanced algorithms and learning systems. Ultimately, the ability of a machine to understand its environment depends on its design and capabilities.

ChatGPT is an AI-based chatbot developed by OpenAI to have a dialogue much a la Turing test. The program is a very large English language model that has been fine-tuned with both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques.