‘Consciousness’ in Robots Was Once Taboo. Not Anymore

I keep seeing talk of artificial consciousness with nothing more than a vague outline of what said "consciousness" would entail, or a hand-wavy "we'll know it when we see it." This is, of course, not that surprising considering we don't have those answers for our own consciousness.

At this stage I'd say we're way more likely to end up developing a system that can trick us into believing it is conscious, à la LaMDA and Blake Lemoine, than an actual conscious entity (whatever that means, exactly). And, if that were to happen, I don't think we'd have a way of knowing that's the case. We could just carry on believing we created artificial consciousness because our not-at-all-conscious robots are too good at saying the right thing with the right prompt.