The barrel: no, you won't lose your self-awareness because you have a memory and a whole history of your self-aware moments before the barrel. However, staying

The barrel: no, you won't lose your self-awareness because you have a memory and a whole history of your self-aware moments before the barrel. However, staying in the barrel for long enough (say 30 years?) might affect your consciousness though I wouldn't recommend experimenting with it :) The self-driving cars are interesting in this regard, but in terms of complexity of their model of the world they are still way behind that of the most primitive insects even, I think. This is due to their limited capability of discovering the world and learning about it. A car that can also sense surfaces and hear things might have a chance to build a more complex model. Add the ability to park and connect to a charging socket by itself and you get a very, very basic organism, possibly a bit self-aware, too. But just because a self-driving car has a model of a macro-world (roads, buildings, other cars) doesn't make it any more self-aware than bacteria.