Machine consciousness as a service (MCaaS): a roadmap

Abstract

The vision of self-managing software systems was proposed in the past two decades. We argue that to be able to realize such vision, a suitable machine consciousness computational model must be incorporated into the software design, as it will be responsible for all cognition, thinking, learning, planning, and decision making tasks. Currently, there exist many general computational models for machine consciousness that could be adopted. They differ in their complexity and their definition of what consciousness is. Therefore, in this paper, we propose to offer machine consciousness as a service (MCaaS). This enables any software system to become "self-managing" by loosely coupling itself with the MCaaS service via a suitable management interface. We propose a roadmap for building such MCaaS service as a composite web service, adopting the StarzykPrasad machine consciousness computational model.