Ask HN: Do you think machine consciousness is possible?

I'm planning on going to grad school to study AI because I think it is very interesting. For a very long time it has just seemed natural to me that computer scientists would eventually discover a way to make computers appear as intelligent as humans. Since it wasn't done yet, I wanted to work on this problem. I had no thoughts of solving it, but perhaps help it along.

However, I recently had the scary idea that machine consciousness may not be possible. I've thought this before, however this time it really hit me and scared me some. Considering I'd like to devote much of my resources to the problem, I'm now a little concerned that it may all be a waste. I'd prefer not to waste my life on something that turns out like the phlogiston theory.

Therefore, because it may bring good discussion and for my own benefit I'm asking:

Do you think machine consciousness (or at least something that looks like it) is possible? If not on current computer architecture, which "new lead" in computation do you think will allow it?

For extra credit: Do you think the Church-Turing thesis (anything that is computable is computable by a Turing machine) indicates that machine consciousness is possible?

What we call consciousness is probably very closely tied with having a physical body perceiving things it the outside world. So I think for a long time there will be differences between machine and man, but machines will eventually win out and become vastly superior to people. I just wouldn't count on it in your lifetime.

The really interesting question is: if we can quantify consciousness, what happens when we create something that's more aware and conscious than we are? Would we be considered sentient by a being that thinks a thousand times faster and in hundreds of thought-trains, lives for a million years, and can converse millions of ways simultaneously at bandwidths millions of times greater than speech?

We would be like insects to something like that, and it's not such a far-fetched idea or that far off.

My personal belief is that the reason progress in AI has been so slow is that AI optimists vastly underestimated the computing power needed to produce good AI, and when our computers are finally fast enough (20-30 years perhaps, and the most important metric is probably not FLOPS but memory bandwidth) AI will actually not be that hard to achieve.

On the other hand, I know if I ever had to debate this question with Daniel Dennett or Eliezer Yudkowsky or any other capable person who believes there's nothing special about "consciousness" I would lose the debate.

Attributing a special meaning to consciousness, on the surface, is just as illogical as believing in religion- Neither seems to have a valid defense, as far as I can tell. Therefore, I find it disquieting that I DON'T believe in religion but DO feel so certain that computers can't be conscious.

Once you figure out the reason for this apparent inconsistency in my belief system, please let me know :)

I don't know if hardware is holding back progress in AI, especially with distributed computing; it is more likely a question of software and programming. I think in order for a computer to exhibit a reasonable facsimile of human intelligence, it will have to do more than just run programs written by humans. It would have to have the ability to write and rewrite its own code.