Computers could develop consciousness and may need 'human' rights, says Oxford professor

Prof du Sautoy added: "In babies there is something called the mirror self-recognition test, a moment where a child recognises the image in the mirror is themselves and has a sense of self. "I think there is something in the brain development which might be like a boiling point. It may be a threshold moment. "Philosophers will say that doesn't guarantee that that thing is really feeling anything and really has a sense of self. It might be just saying all the things that make us think it's alive. But then even in humans we can't know that what a person is saying is real. "Consciousness is like a box that we all have and inside this box we all have something called a beetle.