We Need Conscious Robots - Issue 47: Consciousness

People often ask me whether human-level artificial intelligence will eventually become conscious. My response is: Do you want it to be conscious? I think it is largely up to us whether our machines will wake up. The mechanisms of consciousness--the reasons we have a vivid and direct experience of the world and of the self--are an unsolved mystery in neuroscience, and some people think they always will be; it seems impossible to explain subjective experience using the objective methods of science. But in the 25 or so years that we've taken consciousness seriously as a target of scientific scrutiny, we have made significant progress.