For the last ten years he has mainly been interested in the prospects for building a conscious machine.
In an early effort Igor Aleksander argued that the principles for creating a conscious machine already existed but that it would take forty years to train such a machine to understand language.
The field of artificial intelligence started out with dreams of making thinking - and possibly conscious - machines, but to date, its achievements have been modest.
I caught again the flashes and thought that they were jewels or heaps of shining ores carried by the conscious machine.
An artificially conscious machine should be able to anticipate events correctly in order to be ready to respond to them when they occur or to take premptive action to avert anticipated events.
He is trying to build the world's first conscious machine, a computer wrapped in the body of a toy orangutan named Lucy.
Something that makes the machine not only conscious, but independent.
Philosophers John Searle and Colin McGinn insist that computation alone cannot possibly create a conscious machine.
Imperial technology doesn't use many fully conscious machines--little need for them when we're no longer adventuring into new parts of the galaxy--so I, at any rate, know less about them than my ancestors did.
Annoying, perplexing, incredible, troubling discoveries which were making the great machine more and more conscious that it thought, and therefore ... and therefore there must be purpose to its existence.