Could We Build a Machine with Consciousness?

Not quite yet, but neuroscience research is giving us some clues about how it may be possible in the not-too-distant future. In a paper published in Science today, a trio of neuroscientists, led by Stanislas Dehaene from Colle ge de France in Paris, try to pin down exactly what we mean by "consciousness" in order to work out whether machines could ever possess it. As they see it, there are three kinds of consciousness--and computers have so far mastered only one of them. One is subconsciousness, the huge range of processes in the brain where most human intelligence lies. That's what powers our ability to, say, determine a chess move or spot a face without really knowing how we did it. That, the researchers say, is broadly comparable to the kind of processing that modern-day AIs, such as DeepMind's AlphaGo or Face's facial recognition algorithms, are good at.