Abstract
In the most straightforward sense this is probably not a very live issue, as the likelihood of creating genuine artificial consciousness for a very long time is rather small. Many people seem to think that consciousness is continuous with cognition, so that creating a conscious creature would be just a question of creating an intelligent creature of a certain kind: I will cast doubt on this view (''continuity theory'', as it might be called). Fortunately this would mean that the special ethical conundrums concerning creating artificially conscious creatures (rather than intelligent-but-nonconscious ones) are a relatively long way off.
I shall consider a deeper question: could anything be conscious unless it was a living system? Could one create an artificial consciousness other than by creating something that was alive? Much recent work in robotics stresses the importance of themes from artificial life -- but in such contexts ''alive'' is often interpreted in a rather broad sense. Could consciousness require much deeper features of biological systems than those that are currently considered? Could it be that the links between consciousness and being alive are tighter than those between certain other mental properties -- intelligence, adaptivity, etc -- and liveness?
Answering these questions will take us into a number of other issues, including the following