"The engineering argument for first-person machine consciousness: 1. Some day we should learn how the stream of phenomenal consciousness is generated in human brains. 2. TO understand this is to have an engineering blueprint how to engineer first-person consciousness. 3. If we use this blueprint to build first-person machine consciousness we should be able to build it."

"The combination of machine classification and reasoning creates a functional semblance of human intelligence. The results of such reasoning may serve as the starting point for a layer of meta classification and meta reasoning, which will appear as consciousness in the same way as humans (but not like humans)."

"It is obvious that computer systems are getting increasingly powerful and will gradually take over complex human activities that we tend to consider as requiring some kind of consciousness. In this sense,  computer systems are becoming increasingly conscious and sentient. However, the question whether computer systems will become conscious in the way that human are requires a clear and explicit definition of human consciousness, which would be the subject of continuous change at least as long as human knowledge, challenges, abilities, perceptions, lifestyle, etc. are changing"

"Since human intelligence (and consciousness) occurs in nature it must be a process emerging from physics and chemistry, I see no theoretical reason that would prevent us from eventually reproducing it in man-made systems if we so desired."

"Machines will be able to have something similar to what we call consciousness in the next 10-20 years, but we will not need that to achieve machines with narrow (task-specific) super-human capabilities. This is achieved already today and this is the real use of AI for our society."

"I think it can be done, and we already have a preliminary design for it in the NARS project."

"Machines *will* reach human-level intelligence – which inherently includes the ability to conceptualize abstractly. Consciousness is a direct consequence, or by-product, of this ability."

"I don't know of any reason which should prevent us from developing machine consciousness, and moreover I hope that smarter-than-human machines would eventually solve the Hard Problem of Consciousness, even if humans keep failing at solving it on their own."

"Since we have an existence proof that such things are possible to build from protein, it is evident that no magic will be required."

" I do believe that we are seeing the beginning of an increasing autonomy that will be operationally non-differentiatable from awareness some day – but the border between non-aware and aware is not a sharp one, so I don’t expect this to be a sudden change."

"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."

"The real question is, "how can we know for sure if a machine is conscious?" The answer is we can't. We can't even know for sure if another person is conscious or if instead it just seems that way. The Turing test offers a way around that, suggesting that if we can't tell the difference between communications from an AI and communications from a person, then the AI is, for practical purposes, at least as intelligent or conscious as a person."

"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.  I wrote a blog post titled “Second Person Science” considering this issue"

"It is absurd to think that humans are the only ones that can have consciousness, since we know apes also have it. Anyone claiming that only biological machines, such as humans, can have consciousness is being a biochauvinist. It might be hard to imagine though, looking at the current technology".

"Human level of consciousness is possible to gradually approach, but machines will never get quite there. The key limitation will be the lack of a biological body which will make it practically impossible to experience the qualia of hunger, sexual pleasure, fear, having a flu etc. Difficulties will arise also with things like envy or a sudden insight because our bodies play a role in conscious experiences of those too. So, these future machines--albeit conscious--will never quite understand us."

"Computers won't become conscious "in the same way humans are" -- e.g. using synchronized neural firing or activity in their prefrontal contrex or thalamus."

"I believe that we will have conscious machines at some point.  I believe our brains are incredibly complex, and our current machines are incredibly simple.  Whether through biological or quantum computing, I expect we will dramatically increase the computational capabilities of our machines to exceed that of our brains."

 "I think that, in principle, it will be possible to build machines that are conscious in much the same way that we are. My reasoning for this is that we humans are machines, and we are conscious, or at least claim to be, so we ought to be able to build machines like us (eventually)"

"We already have conscious machines. Their degree of consciousness will evolve and become greater and greater as we progress in the technology and knowledge that we put into them. For example, autonomous cars will be very self conscious."

"Some theories preclude the possibility of machine consciousness while others allow it. The simplest reason that I think machines can likely possess consciousness is that I favor the theories of consciousness that are compatible with machine consciousness. In particular, I suspect consciousness is a natural consequence of sufficiently complex and appropriately interconnected signal-processing networks. As to *how* such networks give rise to consciousness, well, that is one of the central questions of our ongoing explorations of the topic. Hopefully, progress will be made toward illuminating such questions as the natural sciences advance and as engineering itself advances."

"Our conscious mind is bootstrapped in the first months and years of your interaction with the world, yet all the information that governs that bootstrapping is encoded in a small fraction of the information content of our genome. Our current computers also begin to approach the computational complexity of our nervous systems, so I do not see a reason to believe that there are any insurmountable obstacles to creating artificial sentience."

"Machines can be conscious, because we humans are conscious, and we ARE machines. Complex squishy machines, but machines nonetheless."

"Yes, it's possible. Humans are made from stuff that obeys the laws of physics - they constitute an existence proof. The difficulty is just that of working out how the machine (taken in a very wide sense) works and how to build an equivalent."

"For some years people have talked of machines as being "intelligent": we must expect this to continue. This confuses debates about human responsibility: we see increasing "artificial irresponsibility", compounding "artificial stupidity". We must expect people to continue the irresponsible use of machines, aided by uncritical reporting."

"Are dogs conscious? It seems so, but we really don’t know what that question means. We assume conscious awareness in people, but not in machines. We are “fleshists.” There is no way to build something when we don’t really know what it is."

"Human consciousness has many aspects ranging from having a self model, to having subjective experiences or "qualia", to having a sense of being a unitary being with continuity through time. We don't yet understand the nature of these in us, so I think it's too early to predict whether machines will have them. Some aspects, like having a model of self or creating theories of other minds are already being exhibited by some AI systems and are likely to become much further developed in coming years."

"This question is not possible to answer because consciousness is still shrouded in mystery with no adequaute scientific theory or model. People who talk with certainty about this are delusional. There is nothing in principle to say that it cannot be created on a computer but until we know what it is we don’t know if it can occur outside of living organisms."

"The scope of the context will increase as we learn more from the human brain. However, we are far away that anything with human capabilities. Just to have some perspective let’s consider the visual perception problem. There has been great progress because of the amount of data available to implement machine learning algorithms. Computers can now recognize patterns like a cat with great rate of success. This great success is not close to  human visual capabilities yet. Moreover, it helps little to organize the information to make a computer understand the concept of a cat as humans do."

"If we restrict sentience/consciousness to what logicians call positive introspection (I know what I believe, ...), then we are already there with some cognitive agent architectures. If we look to encompass all dimensions of human consciousness, then there are no evidence this is possible and feasible (for example, genuine intrinsic motivations are not present in artificial agents)."

"I believe that subjective self-awareness is possible, and not even particularly challenging, but I also believe that when that challenge is addressed, it will be something that humans can choose to put or not put in intelligent machines. We can have very intelligent machines without a sense of self."

"Consciousness is not a scientific concept; it can’t be detected or tested for in any way. It also doesn’t do anything so no reason exists to invest in research developing artificial consciousness."