At a recent conference on the challenges of artificial intelligence, Christof Koch made clear in his remarks that the stakes were high: "By mid-century, humanity will be surrounded by ubiquitous, flexible, highly intelligent autonomous agents, and this will profoundly affect our future--including whether we have any." Dr. Koch--who is the chief scientist of the Mindscope Program at the Allen Institute for brain science in Seattle--was speaking to a group of roughly a hundred academics, diplomats and journalists. The conference was hosted by the Vatican at the Cancelleria, a 15th-century Renaissance palace in Rome, and centered around the theme of "the challenge of artificial intelligence for human society and the idea of the human person." This was the second event at the Vatican to focus on artificial intelligence, commonly abbreviated as A.I. Just before Italy entered into a nationwide lockdown last year, the Pontifical Academy for Life held a workshop on A.I. in February 2020. This workshop ultimately produced a "Call for AI Ethics," which was signed by Microsoft, IBM, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations and the Italian government, in addition to the Academy.

Consciousness is a thriving industry. Consciousness is a buzzing business in neuroscience labs and brain institutes. Just a few decades ago, consciousness barely registered as a credible subject for science. Perhaps no one did more to legitimize its study than Francis Crick, who launched a second career in neurobiology after cracking the genetic code. In the 1980s Crick found a brilliant collaborator in the young scientist Christof Koch.

The question of whether artificial beings or machines could become self-aware or consciousness has been a philosophical question for centuries. The main problem is that self-awareness cannot be observed from an outside perspective and the distinction of whether something is really self-aware or merely a clever program that pretends to do so cannot be answered without access to accurate knowledge about the mechanism's inner workings. We review the current state-of-the-art regarding these developments and investigate common machine learning approaches with respect to their potential ability to become self-aware. We realise that many important algorithmic steps towards machines with a core consciousness have already been devised. For human-level intelligence, however, many additional techniques have to be discovered.

Consciousness is a thriving industry. Consciousness is a buzzing business in neuroscience labs and brain institutes. Just a few decades ago, consciousness barely registered as a credible subject for science. Perhaps no one did more to legitimize its study than Francis Crick, who launched a second career in neurobiology after cracking the genetic code. In the 1980s Crick found a brilliant collaborator in the young scientist Christof Koch. In some ways, they made an unlikely team. Crick, a legend in science, was an outspoken atheist, while Koch, 40 years younger, was a Catholic yearning for ultimate meaning. Together, they published a series of pioneering articles on the neural correlates of consciousness until Crick died in 2004. Koch went on to a distinguished career at Caltech before joining the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. Today, as the president and chief scientific officer, he supervises several hundred scientists, engineers, and informatics experts trying to map the brain and figure out how our neural circuits process information. The Institute recently made news with the discovery of three giant neurons connecting many regions of the mouse brain, including one that wraps around the entire brain. The neurons extend from a set of cells known as the claustrum, which Crick and Koch maintained could act as a seat of consciousness. Koch is one of the great thinkers about consciousness. He has a philosophical frame of mind and jumps readily from one big idea to the next.

The following is an edited, updated version of an article originally written for IEEE Spectrum. I'm 62, with all that entails. I still play a mean game of hockey, but entropy looms ever larger. So part of me wants very much to believe that we are rapidly approaching "The Singularity." Like heaven, the Singularity comes in many versions, but most involve bionic brain boosting.

The following is an edited, updated version of an article originally written for IEEE Spectrum. I'm 62, with all that entails. I still play a mean game of hockey, but entropy looms ever larger. So part of me wants very much to believe that we are rapidly approaching "The Singularity." Like heaven, the Singularity comes in many versions, but most involve bionic brain boosting.