Define "consciousness".
That's the fundamental problem, that we don't know what it is. We know what it looks like in a human, and we know what it feels like to ourselves. But we don't have any rigorous, non-intuitive idea of what it means.
For myself, I think of consciousness as the ability to watch yourself think - of being aware of your thought process. By that definition, yes, artificial consciousness could be possible - but first you have to have a machine that thinks. And now we're hung up on trying to find a definition of "think" that's rigorous...
I like the way that axotty labeled the claim as "speculative". It is, even though that speculative assumption is the dominant paradigm of AI. But it definitely is speculative, at least at this time, because actual evidence is quite lacking.
