Here's How to Get to Conscious Machines, Neuroscientists Say

"We cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of." Unlike the director leads you to believe, the protagonist of Ex Machina, Andrew Garland's 2015 masterpiece, isn't Caleb, a young programmer tasked with evaluating machine consciousness. Like most cerebral movies, Ex Machina leaves the conclusion up to the viewer: was Ava actually conscious? In doing so, it also cleverly avoids a thorny question that has challenged most AI-centric movies to date: what is consciousness, and can machines have it? As machine intelligence barrels forward at breakneck speed--not only exceeding human performance on games such as DOTA and Go, but doing so without the need for human expertise--the question has once more entered the scientific mainstream.