The Holy Grail of A.I. is not the creation of artificial consciousness but rather the worst kind of unholy, diabolical deception I can imagine: To trick and deceive humans to believe a machine is sentient.
We as humans need to deeply understand the reality of sentience, awareness and life. The key component of genuine consciousness is creativity - the ability to break the chain of causality by intent and decision. A machine will never be able to step out of causality and become creative and sentient, no matter how convincing it might appear to do so. It will always be just a monumental lie. Why? Because sentience is rooted in the dimension of the present moment, whereas an algorithm is bound...