Susan Schneider

The arrival of artificial consciousness at a level capable of rivaling or exceeding our would be truly monumental. It may take us wholly by surprise, challenging our ethical and scientific frameworks. In this talk I provide a framework for understanding machine consciousness based on my Superpsychist position. I combine a resonance theory of consciousness, work on spacetime emergence, and a new understanding of how quantum entanglement and decoherence enable consciousness, drawn from Quantum Darwinism. I explore which AI systems are best able to exploit these conditions to achieve consciousness, at least in principle. Of special interest are certain forms of biological AIs, neuromorphic systems and quantum computation.