When people think about the future and artificial intelligence, they have all these crazy ideas about robots becoming conscious like skynet in terminator or Hal on 2001 a space odyssey. But I suspect the opposite will be true. Things like the human brain project in the EU and the brain initiative in the US, and other research are likely to explain human consciousness. I suspect it will answer long standing questions about spirituality. And by time we implement sophisticated AI, consciousness won't be a mystery.
Consciousness and AI have almost nothing to do with each-other. Human beings only reason when awake and self-aware, but this is most likely a quirk of ours (ie: the daemon `cognit` only runs at init-level 3), not a fundamental feature of cognition.
