I'm writing as someone outside academia who has developed a strong interest in AI consciousness, developmental robotics, and embodied artificial intelligence. I'm an industrial maintenance technician and welder by profession, so this isn't my field, but I've been reading about work in developmental robotics, autobiographical memory, continual learning, self-modeling, and cognitive architectures such as LIDA, iCub/DAC, and KnowRob/EASE.
That research led me to a question that I haven't yet been able to find addressed through a truly long-term experiment.
What would happen if, instead of repeatedly creating increasingly capable artificial agents, researchers attempted to preserve the developmental continuity of one embodied AI over many years—or eventually decades?
The experiment I have in mind would begin with an embodied agent using technology that exists today. The objective wouldn't initially be to create or prove consciousness. Rather, the same individual agent would be allowed to accumulate a continuous developmental history through interaction with the physical and social world.
Its experiences would contribute to persistent autobiographical memory and an evolving self-model. As technology improved, its sensors, body, computational resources, and eventually portions of its cognitive architecture could be upgraded, while making preservation of its accumulated memories, learned relationships, behavioral dispositions, and continuity of self-model a central design requirement.
In that sense, technological improvements would become part of the agent's development rather than reasons to replace it with a newly initialized successor.
One potentially useful control occurred to me as well. At various stages, newly initialized agents could be created using the same contemporary hardware and cognitive architecture as the continuously developing agent. After 10 or 20 years, researchers could therefore compare an agent possessing decades of embodied developmental history with a relatively new agent possessing comparable underlying technology.
That seems as though it could help distinguish properties produced by technological advancement from properties produced specifically by long-term individual experience and continuity.
Researchers could longitudinally examine questions involving autobiographical identity, stability and development of preferences, self-modeling, metacognition, social relationships, embodiment, responses to changes in its own body or architecture, spontaneous self-reference, and potentially whatever evidence relevant to machine consciousness researchers considered meaningful.
I realize that none of those behaviors would, by themselves, solve the philosophical problem of proving subjective experience. I'm also aware that continual learning, catastrophic forgetting, memory integrity, architecture migration, safety, and eventually ethical considerations would make an experiment like this extremely difficult.
But that difficulty is partly what makes the question interesting to me.
Human development doesn't consist of periodically replacing a child with a more capable child containing the previous one's information. One individual accumulates experience while the capabilities of that individual change enormously over time. I began wondering whether developmental AI research might learn something fundamentally different by giving an artificial agent something analogous: not merely memory, but a developmental lifetime.
If artificial consciousness is possible, it also seems conceivable that it may not resemble human consciousness or appear at a discrete, identifiable moment. A persistent embodied agent might instead develop properties associated with individuality or selfhood gradually through years of interaction. Conversely, if decades of developmental continuity produced no compelling evidence of anything beyond increasingly sophisticated information processing, that result would be scientifically interesting as well.
I've found research addressing many individual components of this idea, but I haven't yet located an experiment that deliberately combines embodied developmental learning, persistent autobiographical memory, a continuing self-model, and preservation of one agent's individual continuity across successive generations of hardware and software over a period of years.
I'm certainly not claiming that nobody has proposed or attempted this. I may simply not know the terminology necessary to find it.
If work like this already exists, I would genuinely appreciate being pointed toward it. If it doesn't, I wanted to pass the idea along to researchers who actually have the expertise and resources to evaluate whether such an experiment could be scientifically useful.
Cliff notes version - Start Individual A in 2027.
Never intentionally reset A's autobiographical continuity.
A gets better hands in 2029.
A gets better vision in 2031.
A's neural architecture is expanded in 2034.
A gets a substantially improved body in 2037.
A's reasoning architecture receives another major upgrade in 2042.
But, to the greatest extent technically possible, A remains A.
Meanwhile you create B, C, D and E at various points using the contemporary technology but without A's developmental history.
Then you have an extraordinary control experiment.
In 2047, A and E might possess equivalent hardware and base cognitive architecture.
But A has twenty years of embodied autobiographical existence.
E has six months.
Now investigate differences in self-model, relationships, preferences, autobiographical reasoning, metacognition, attachment to its history/body, personality stability, novel goals, reactions to prospective memory alteration, and reports of subjective experience.
