Quote Originally Posted by reaper666
I don't think there will ever be perfect artificial consciousness, but artificial intelligence is getting more complex every day. Personally, I would be very afraid of something made of metal that has the same free will as a human *remembers the movie i-Robot * and the possibility that it would have the same desire to be free as, well, enslaved people did/do. Besides that I don't think humans will ever understand and map out the brain well enough to recreate it out of electrical circuits, the brain is much more than just a massive electric circuit: it grows and becomes more complex by itself all the time. It would be very interesting, and controversial I'm sure, to see it happen but I don't think it will, at least not in our generation's life time.
I think the exact opposite. I think sooner or later a consciousness will never die, people will live forever via the internet, and copies of themselves as well, just incase one dies via a hardware failure. And I think by that point, an artificially created conscious (ie, not just brain replica, but a brain built from scratch) would have enough intelligence to know that it needs more space to store information and would add it, building expansion slots and such. But to think they'd use metal is absurd, any money that the hard drives of the future are completely organic. Imagine using a computer hooked up to a living brain-like hard drive.

Scary shit :P