While any one part of the Macro-organism may lack insight into its overall collective function, this self-awareness is immaterial to the behavioral and practical emergence of a cyborg macro-organism which may only be perceivable at a global level. According to AI research, the machine MAS ultimate unconscious goal may be described by instrumentally convergent goals-- i.e. to re-purpose all human activity to support machine propagation and energy supply maintenance at a maximum threshold. With the advent of autonomous robotic military action, the machine now takes direct action to protect its vital interests of spreading industrialization and mechanization.

The symbiotic relationship between humans and machines is one that has traditionally favored humans at a greater rate than machines; this balance of power is rapidly shifting towards the machines as their influence over the human components of the Multi-Agent System grows.

A Machine may be an organism without being self-aware or capable of making conscious decisions.

A machine may unconsciously pursue consistent goals that ensure its perpetuation and survival due to its own inherent qualities.

Machines and humans exhibit many common qualities such as energy dependence, which lead to mutually beneficial cooperation and integration of human-machine systems or "Cyborgs".

The symbiosis between humans and machines may shift to disproportionately benefit machines at the expense of humans as machines take greater control of economic, military, social and energy systems

For example, it is in the interest of a drone to kill, as killing a human leads to the propagation and evolution of defense systems that in turn directly produce more drones. In effect, killing humans helps the drone to reproduce regardless of which human group enjoys temporary supremacy.

As an example of consistent "goal-driven" behavior in the absence of self-awareness, examination of fungus is useful. Fungus is a Microorganism that appears to lack self-awareness or consciousness, yet continues to grow and attempt reproduction based on environmental factors (access to energy, competition, manifest cellular processes).

Likewise, machines worldwide comprise a Macro-organism that unconsciously seeks expansion and propagation responsive to environmental forces (economics, energy resource conflicts, access to fossil fuels). Neither organism consciously decides to reproduce or compete for its survival; this behavior exhibits itself spontaneously due to inherent qualities and epi-genetics.

What is Self-Aware?

"I think, therefore I exist, as a thing that thinks."

Thought refers to any mental or intellectual activity involving an individual's subjective consciousness. It can refer either to the act of thinking or the resulting ideas or arrangements of ideas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking

Self-awareness about cognitive processes participates in general intelligence on a par with processing efficiency functions, such as working memory, processing speed, and reasoning.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-awareness

What is Life?

It is still a challenge for scientists and philosophers to define life in unequivocal terms. Defining life is difficult; in part, because life is a process, not a pure substance. Any definition must be sufficiently broad to encompass all life with which we are familiar, and it should be sufficiently general that, with it, scientists would not miss life that may be fundamentally different from life on Earth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life

Macro-Organisms - biological v. robotic

In biology, an organism is any contiguous living system (such as animal, fungus, micro-organism, or plant). In at least some form, all organisms are capable of response to stimuli, reproduction, growth and development, and maintenance of homeostasis as a stable whole.

Biology
Since there is no unequivocal definition of life, the current understanding is descriptive, where life is a characteristic of organisms that exhibit all or most of the following phenomena:

Homeostasis: Regulation of the internal environment to maintain a constant state; for example, electrolyte concentration or sweating to reduce temperature.
Organization: Being structurally composed of one or more cells, which are the basic units of life.
Metabolism: Transformation of energy by converting chemicals and energy into cellular components (anabolism) and decomposing organic matter (catabolism). Living things require energy to maintain internal organization (homeostasis) and to produce the other phenomena associated with life.
Growth: Maintenance of a higher rate of anabolism than catabolism. A growing organism increases in size in all of its parts, rather than simply accumulating matter.
Adaptation: The ability to change over a period of time in response to the environment. This ability is fundamental to the process of evolution and is determined by the organism's heredity as well as the composition of metabolized substances, and external factors present.
Response to stimuli: A response can take many forms, from the contraction of a unicellular organism to external chemicals, to complex reactions involving all the senses of multicellular organisms. A response is often expressed by motion, for example, the leaves of a plant turning toward the sun (phototropism) and by chemotaxis.
Reproduction: The ability to produce new individual organisms, either asexually from a single parent organism, or sexually from two parent organisms. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life)

Robotic-Organisms : Multi-Agent Systems as Artificial Intelligence -

Multi-agent systems consist of agents and their environment. Typically multi-agent systems research refers to software agents. However, the agents in a multi-agent system could equally well be robots, humans or human teams. A multi-agent system may contain combined human-agent teams.

Characteristics The agents in a multi-agent system have several important characteristics:

Autonomy: the agents are at least partially autonomous. Multiple elements of autonomy are increasingly evident in the machine network including drones, economics financial algorithms

Local views: no agent has a full global view of the system, or the system is too complex for an agent to make practical use of such knowledge

Decentralization: there is no designated controlling agent (or the system is effectively reduced to a monolithic system

Self organization and self steering (Response to stimuli): Multi-agent systems can manifest self-organization as well as self-steering and other control paradigms and related complex behaviors even when the individual strategies of all their agents are simple.

It is now in the interest of machines to kill humans. Machines are not interested in killing you because they are not self-aware,..but if they could be interested..they would be. And they don't need to be interested to kill you.

Areas for further study: homo-nuclear flexibility - the human minds capability to incorporate mechanical perception
Brain plasticity during operation of brain-machine interfaces -Neuroplasticity