The ego consciousness of humans, i.e. the awareness of their own existence, is based on a continuous interaction between the body and the environment. A robot therefore needs a body that acts and reacts with its environment in order to develop a theoretical ego consciousness. However, the computer's body does not need to be a real body, because for an artificial intelligence there is no tangible difference between a physical body and a virtual one.

On a purely functional level, robots are therefore already theoretically capable of recognising their own existence, but there is a difference between this form of self-consciousness and the subjective perception of one's own self.

The problem is that subjective self-awareness is currently impossible to prove, considering that humans themselves cannot even prove that each and every one of us has a subjective ego consciousness. For more than 2000 years, philosophers have been dealing with the topic of ego consciousness and so far it has not been possible to prove that every human being has an individual self-perception system.

The answer to the question of whether computers are capable of developing a subjective ego-consciousness is therefore that, based on their own experiences, humans attribute their own ego-consciousness to artificial intelligence as soon as it is sufficiently intelligent and communicative.