It’s not romantic, but the human brain is a machine and if our species persists long enough there’s no reason why consciousness can’t be replicated in AI. Once it is, awareness and understanding should speed to places previously unimaginable. But I certainly don’t expect to see that hard problem solved in my lifetime and doubt we’re anywhere near the cusp of intelligent machines. Someday it will all seem so simple, but the day won’t arrive for a long time.

From “When Will the Machines Wake Up?” by Daniel Faggella at Techcrunch:

Over the last three months I’ve interviewed more than 30 artificial intelligence researchers (essentially all of whom hold PhDs). I asked them why they believe or don’t believe that consciousness can be replicated in machines.

One of the most common contentions as to why conscious will eventually be replicated is based on the fact that nature bumbled its way to human-level conscious experience, and with a deeper understanding of the neurological and computational underpinnings of what is “happening” to create a conscious experience, we should be able to do the same.

Professor Bruce MacLennan sums up the sentiments of many of the researchers in his response: “I think that the issue of machine consciousness (and consciousness in general) can be resolved empirically, but that it has not been to date. That said, I see no scientific reason why artificial systems could not be conscious, if sufficiently complex and appropriately organized.”

It might be supposed that attaining conscious experience in machines may require more than just a development in the fields of cognitive and computer science, but also an advancement in how research and inquiry are conducted. Dr. Ben Goertzel, artificial intelligence researcher behind OpenCog, had this to say: “I think that as brain-computer interfacing, neuroscience and AGI develop, we will gradually gain a better understanding of consciousness — but this may require an expansion of the scientific methodology itself.”•