Stuart Russell says no one is building conscious AI.

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The most common misconception is that what AI people are working towards is a conscious machine, that until you have a conscious machine there's nothing to worry about. It's really a red herring.

To my knowledge, nobody, no one who is publishing papers in the main field of AI, is even working on consciousness. I think there are some neuroscientists who are trying to understand it, but I'm not aware that they've made any progress.

As far as AI people, nobody is trying to build a conscious machine, because no one has a clue how to do it, at all. We have less clue about how to do that than we have about build a faster-than-light spaceship.

Commentary from Stuart Russell, a computer scientist at the University of California at Berkeley.