A nominally capitalist country pays a communist country for much of its manufacturing because it's cheaper, instead of employing its own citizens. So the logical next step is to just buy the robot factory workers from China to replace workers in the U.S. to save on shipping costs.

Fine. McDonald's for you.

This

I think your mistake lies in the word "initial". If I am correct, consciousness is a recursive process, and a break anywhere along the essential path keeps it from occuring. They've found one place where a break will keep it from occuring. I expect there are others. But you don't get consciousness until ALL the pieces are present, because consciousness requires recursion. So there isn't any "initial" piece. You can start at any of several different places, and if all the pieces are there, you get consciousness.

Please note that there are lots of pieces that aren't a part of the essential path. Late Alzheimers are conscious, even though they are separated from their memory. So is an infant. And it's separated also from intelligence. And from most sensory perception. (It's hard to be sure that consciousness doesn't require SOME sensory perception, but there's no evidence that it does. Helen Keller shows that certainly only minimal sensory perception is required.) Some trance states seem to show that it can be suppressed by certain paterns of thought...though I'm not sure, as it could be that they just reduce the level of memory formation until you can't remember being conscious. Are sleep walkers conscious? They don't remember what they were doing when they awaken, but this isn't really proof. Perhaps they are non-verbally conscious, and so the memories formed aren't indexed with verbal tags, but at the time they MAY have been conscious.

So it's quite difficult to determine from commonly available data what parts of the mind are necessary for the presence of consciousness. Even the definition is a bit fuzzy. If you don't remember being conscious, does this mean that you weren't? I don't think so, but many common uses of the term seem to imply this. E.g., the common proof of unconsciousness under general anesthesia is that you don't remember being conscious. But anesthesia commonly interferes with memory formation even while you are recovering from it to the point of asking questions. And I think that if you are asking "How did the operation go?", then you need to be counted as conscious, even if you can't remember either asking the question or what the answer was.

The correct question, assuming the story is factual, would be something along the lines of "What do want us to put in the lab we're going to give you for free, sonny?"

eyes open, unresponsive to stimuli (can't be woken up), no memory of entering the state

Yes, but this isn't sleep. This is more like watching Fox News.

The claustrum has a phylogenetic background appearing predominantly in insectivores, Prosimians, and Marsupials.

Hmmm. A hint as to where to look for consciousness most similar to humans?

They will probably always remain inherently beyond the reach of scientific evidence.

Yes. that's because they are 100% made-up. Just as Santa Claus is inherently beyond the reach of scientific evidence.

You will never find evidence, that is, anything manifesting as objective reality, for a wholly illusory concept. You can, of course, drown yourself in delusion. We appear to be well designed for exactly that exercise, we even practice it most nights during REM sleep. And it's perfectly acceptable, socially speaking. Imagine away.

grave. Good grief. :)

It's a grace situation. Revolting, in fact.

Sounds nice, but without explicit control over what American companies are allowed to do at/across the border, (and foreign companies the other way) it's not going to happen. Right now, the door is wide open in every way: Hire offshore and have the hires work here *or* there, keep your money offshore and avoid taxes with blissful ease, manufacture elsewhere, all the while you're paying off congress and whatever agencies are involved.

Sure, corporations are people. Sociopaths. Psychopaths. Those kinds of people. Evil slimeballs, primarily. Exceptions are very rare, and will remain so, as long as being competitive means one company has to take advantage of the same things the next one over does.

That's the way it works now. And unless you can forward larger envelopes to congress (directly, indirectly, or metaphorically) than big business can, or somehow make congress actually ethical and focused on the betterment of the country, this is only going to become more so. Money for election chests. Sweet land deals for cousin George. Fully paid fact finding junkets. Post-congress speaking deals. Guaranteed book advances, complete with ghostwriter, sales irrelevant. Well paid lobbyist positions, commentator positions, corporate vice presidential or other high paid positions... or money... or a sweet deal on a boat, or a house, or whatever, all for 2nd cousins of course. It's so corrupt and ingrained you can't possibly picture it until you've had an inside view (yes, I have.)

Today, you want a great job? Start your own business. Are you really great at programming? Write a great program. Are you really great at electronics? Create a great device. The internet of things is rising, your opportunity is knocking. Real AI needs done (oooo, hard.) Are you really great at mechanicals? Create a wonderful mechanical thing. These are the *only* doors that remain open to technical people in general. Easy? Hell no. But there it is. Otherwise, change career tracks while you still can. Finance. Lawyers (it's the dark side, all right, but it's also a license to print money, especially with the extremely deep collection of bad law we have now.) Nursing -- medicine looks good right now, but doctors... not so sure.

Otherwise, prepare to be lowballed, then fall (or be thrown) from the workforce segment you're qualified for as you age. Also, just as a PS, you'll note that above, the apologists consistently talk about who is learning what in school. The underlying message is clear: Once you're out of school and if you manage to improve yourself, you're not particularly hirable. They're not even looking at/for you.

That's just the way it is. Be proactive and possibly suffer, or just definitely suffer. Choose.

How would you determine this, quantitatively? Is there a series of questions you could ask a machine translator about the text that would distinguish it from a human translator? Asking questions like "How did this make you feel?" is getting into the Turing Test's territory. Asking questions like "Why did Alice feel X" or "Why did you choose this word over another word in this sentence?" is something that machines are getting better at answering all the time.

To head off the argument that machine translation is just using large existing corpus of human-generated text, my response is that is pretty much what humans do. Interact with a lot of other humans and their texts to understand the meaning. Clearly humans have the tremendous advantage of actually experiencing some of what is written about to ground their understanding of the language, but as machine translation shows it is not a necessity for demonstrating an understanding of language.

For the argument that meaning must be grounded in conscious experience for it to be considered "intelligence" I would argue that machine learning *has* experience spread across many different research institutions and over time. Artificial selection has produced those agents and models which work well for human language translation, and this experience is real, physical experience of algorithms in the world. Not all algorithms and models survived, the survivors were shaped by this experience even though it was not tied to one body, machine, location, or time. Whether machine translation agents are consciously aware of this experience, I couldn't say. They almost certainly have no direct memory of it, but evidence of the experience exists. Once a system gets to the point that it can provide a definite answer to the question "What have machine translation agents experienced?" and integrate everything it knows about itself and the research done to create it, then we'll have an answer.

Everything humans do is simply a matter of following a natural-selection-generated set of instructions, bootstrapping from the physical machinery of a single cell. Neurological processes work together in the brain to produce intelligence in humans, at least as far as we can tell. Removing parts of the human brain (via disease, injury, surgery, etc.) can reduce different aspects of intelligence, so it's not unreasonable to think that humans are also a pile of algorithms united in a special way that leads to general intelligence and that AI efforts are only lacking some of the pieces and a way of uniting them. As researchers put together more and more of the individual pieces (speech and object recognition, navigation, information gathering and association, etc.) the results probably won't look like artificial general intelligence until all the necessary pieces exist and it's only the integration that remains to be done. For example there's another article today about the claustrum in a woman that appears to be an effective on-off switch for her consciousness, strengthening the evidence for consciousness being an integration of various neural subsystems mediated by other regions that produce consciousness.

It's important to consider that AGI may act nothing like human or animal intelligence, either. It may not be interested in communication, exploration, or anything else that humans are interested in. Its drives or goals will be the result of its algorithms, and we shouldn't discount the possibility of very inhuman intelligence that nonetheless has a lot of power to change the world. Expecting androids or anthropomorphic robots to emerge from the first AGI is wishful thinking. The simplest AGI would probably be most similar to bacteria or other organisms we find annoying; it would understand the world well enough to improve itself with advanced technology but wouldn't consider the physical world to consist of anything but resources for its own growth. It may even lack sentient consciousness.

Producing human-equivalent AGI is a step or two beyond functional AGI. Implementing all of nature's tricks for getting humans to do the things we do in silicon will not be a trivial task. Look at The Moral Landscape or similar for ideas about how one might go about reverse engineering what makes humans "human" so that the rules could be encoded in AGI.