[mindcrime]

Well, it depends on how you define "consciousness", and that's far from a settled issue as I understand it. But taking my own (naive) idea of what it means to be "conscious", and what I (think) I know about AI, I don't see any reason to think we won't achieve artificial consciousness. In fact, I wouldn't reject the notion out of hand, that some machine somewhere already is conscious, and we just don't know it.

[ChrisGranger]

That last sentence is particularly interesting to me... What if there are already sentient computers who have, for whatever reason, decided that it's in their best interest to hide their sentience from us?

[mindcrime]

That's an interesting thought. I was actually thinking more along the lines of "a computer is conscious but just doesn't have any means of indicating so" rather than "intentionally concealing the fact". But you definitely raise an interesting question. I suppose either scenario is possible.