Here in Dork City, we believe that machine consciousness is the AI research that matters.
Most researchers and engineers in 2019 have been using AI for everything under the sun. Everything, except for its logical conclusion: creating conscious machines. After the creation of conscious machines, however, we'll find that none of the other work made a huge difference.
Sure, people's lives will have been improved and saved and given meaning, and that makes it a wonderful and honorable pursuit. However, at the cosmic scale, these advancements will be forgotten, because humans are stuck here on Earth. There will be some successful human colonies on other planets, but by and large, human space colonization will be fraught with peril and tragedy. Light-speed travel and cryogenics are not yet possible, and even the nearest star is a 10,000+ year journey away with current technology. Sustaining life for this long without solar energy isn't going to be easy, if it's possible at all.
Fortunately, it's a lot easier to keep a computer alive. A computer can sustain itself nearly indefinitely, even with minimal power, provided it's given enough resources to maintain itself. And, unlike with human life, the amount of resources needed for this are small and computable. In other words, today we could feasibly create a ship that has a reasonable certainty of bringing a working computer to another star. The same can't be said about humans, at least not without a machine smart enough to reboot life when it gets there.
Realistically, a conscious machine is possible with today's technology. Many people make the mistake of assuming consciousness requires human-level intelligence, however repeated experiments have shown that simpler animals have consciousness as well. Sure, they're not as smart as humans, but the evidence strongly suggests that they are conscious. For those in the medical and farming industries, this might be an inconvenient truth. For the computing industry, however, this presents an opportunity to demonstrate consciousness without conspiracy theorists worrying about some version of "the singularity" arising from their research.
Below are some links to current research on machine consciousness:
- Open Cog - They're attempting programmatic consciousness, which could be why they haven't seen much success. Programmatic cognition is much more difficult to get right compared to naturally arising consciousness from e.g. neural nets.
- “Consciousness and Conscious Machines: What’s At Stake?” - A conversation on machine consciousness would be incomplete without at least a brief mention of the social implications of conscious machines.