Neuroscience is helping us build a machine with consciousness

Conscious robots with the capabilities of human beings are one of the oldest sci-fi tropes; a threatening blend of human and machine that could turn from friend to foe at a moment's notice. With recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) systems, there are many who both hope and worry that we will advance this technology far enough to actually create a machine with consciousness. And neuroscience researchers truly believe that they might be on the path to one day achieving this. In a paper published on Friday in Science, Stanislas Dehaene from Collège de France in Paris led a team of neuroscientists to get a better grasp on the computational aspect of consciousness and, as a followup, if the quantitative phenomena under study could ever be reproduced in a machine. The team framed consciousness not as a singular concept, but as three distinct types. As for the potential to integrate human computational power into robotics, they concluded that only one of these three types has been achieved by computers -- so even if it is possible, there is still oceans of work to be done.