Do you think machine consciousness is possible?
modeless: I've never heard a good reason why it wouldn't be possible.  But even supposing that it isn't, AI research is not wasted.  It is clear that products related to AI (natural language processing, computer vision, game opponents, etc) can be exceedingly useful even though they're not sufficient to produce a conscious AI.  So don't worry!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.