Can Artificial Intelligence Be Conscious? – Hacker Noon

Recently, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about AI. It's understandable because the technology is quickly seeping into every corner of modern life, present in everything from Autonomous Vehicles to I-phone's Siri. As AI automates repetitive tasks, adds intelligence to existing products, achieves impossible accuracy, and adapts through progressive learning it will become the most important technological phenomena of the 22nd century -- second, perhaps, only to the Blockchain. The exact definition of AI is hotly debated and there are already many fantastic explanations of AI on the internet, so I won't dive in too deeply. But broadly speaking, AI is advanced statistics and applied mathematics which harnesses new advances in computing power and the explosion of available data to give computers new powers of inference, recognition, and choice. Machine learning (ML), the most promising subset of AI, is a field that aims to teach computers to learn from examples (or "Data") and perform a task without being explicitly programmed to do so.