Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart) / quote 5 of 171
Consciousness is the key issue for superintelligence
There are a few who argue that consciousness is a result of the fundamental organizational principle of the brain and therefore that we cannot call any machine truly intelligent without it. In other words, human consciousness is not a useless phenomenon but confers some real adaptive advantage. Whether that advantage is enough to survive a mega-superfast-and-supersmart army of zombie artificial intelligences is another question. I argue that consciousness is the fundamental issue for superintelligence, and thus, in contrast to many writers on AI, I focus on machine consciousness.