I love this stuff. But I keep running into this supposition that consciousness is required for the singularity. I can't agree less. It would seem to me that it would be much easier to create super human level intelligence in a computer than to bring about consciousness in a computer. I think the singularity is more about technology changing as a result of AI at a pace so fast that humans no longer understand that technology fully. Why does that require consciousness? Again, I don't think it does.

Not only that, (see above comment), consciousness does not imply intelligence, nor is human brain emulation guaranteed to lead to greater than human level intelligence.

IN FACT, I would go so far as to say that we should AVOID the emergence of consciousness in AI systems if we want to avoid a hard take off. We already know that consciousness comes in good and evil varieties, and there's no way to predict conscious AI evolution.

interesting talk even though he's a mystic. it's a shame christof koch wasn't a speaker.

@Rick Schettino
if we accept I.J. Good's premise that AI should be able to 'far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever' then avoiding consciousness in AI would render it far less than human and by definition not AI, merely a very advanced supercomputer, and one unable to understand reasoning, abstraction, the difference between objectivity and subjectivity etc. A without I is not AI.

That was one helluva mental masturbation session.