system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why is artificial consciousness expected as "a matter of time" when consciousness is so poorly understood?

Perhaps I'm just getting my terms confused, but I find these discussions very odd. I'm not talking about artificial intelligence, nor the capacity of computer programs to learn.

I hear two statements that seem to me totally incompatible coming from educated people on a semi-regular basis:

1) We do not have much of an understanding of consciousness- what it is, or where it comes from. (It is assumed to come from the brain, but this is more of an educated guess than a scientific conclusion)

2) It is only a matter of time before we develop artificial consciousness. (The time period quoted is usually somewhere between 5 and 100 years)

Is there something I'm missing? If we don't have any idea what consciousness is, why do we so readily assume that we can bestow it to robots?
gpt
The short answer is: no, you're probably not really missing anything, at least it's a good question what you've asked, and many people *are* critical of these sorts of extravagances associated with transhumanism and so on.

The longer answer is that there are some arguments we should consider in defense of such extravagances--though the matter remains in any case very obscure and contentious, i.e., so that, in this sense, we're not really contradicting the short answer here.

One way of making optimistic predictions about strong AI seem less extravagant is to argue that we don't need to fully understand the origins of consciousness, we just need to understand that consciousness does in fact arise (however this happens) from certain conditions, and then to duplicate those conditions.  These conditions seem to be satisfied by human brains, and the relevant feature of human brains is often (though not unanimously) regarded to be its function, so that it seems reasonable to infer that a functional equivalent of the human brain will produce consciousness (even if we don't know how exactly this happens).

Another way of defending optimistic claims about strong AI is to argue for a model involving one or another kind of evolutionary computing/engineering, where the artificial intelligence or pre-intelligence is capable of modifying its own structure, and/or of creating the next generation of the similar technology (which again creates the next generation, and so on).  The idea is that this sort of evolutionary process could proceed through iterations much more quickly than is accomplished by normal procedures of invention, i.e. by humans, and that this is where we can expect strong AI to come from.  So again the general idea is that we don't necessarily have to have adequate knowledge about the origins of consciousness, or what have you, yet we can still produce a process which leads to strong AI.