(Wired) – In his new book, A World Appears, Michael Pollan argues that artificial intelligence can do many things—it just can’t be a person.

A conscious AI might lack a clear commercial rationale (how do you monetize the thing?) and create sticky moral dilemmas (how should we treat a machine capable of suffering?). Yet some AI engineers have come to think that the holy grail of artificial general intelligence—a machine that is not only supersmart but also endowed with a human level of understanding, creativity, and common sense—might require something like consciousness to attain. In the tech community, what had been an informal taboo surrounding conscious AI—as a prospect that the public would find creepy—suddenly began to crumble. (Read More)