Although consciousness has been difficult to define, most researchers in artificial intelligence would agree that AI systems to date have not exhibited anything resembling consciousness. But is a conscious machine possible in the near future? I suggest that a new definition of consciousness may provide a basis for developing a conscious machine. The key is pattern recognition of correlated events in time, leading to the identification of a unified self-agent. Such a conscious system can create a simplified virtual environment, revise it to reflect updated sensor inputs, and partition the environment into self, other agents, and relevant objects. It can track recent time sequences of events, predict future events based on models and patterns in memory, and attribute causality to events and agents. It can make rapid decisions based on incomplete data, and can dynamically learn new responses based on appropriate measures of success and failure. The central aspect of consciousness is the generation of a dynamic narrative, a real-time model of a self-agent pursuing goals in a virtual reality. A conscious machine of this type may be implemented using an appropriate neural network linked to episodic memories. Near-term applications may include autonomous vehicles and online agents for cybersecurity. Paper presented at virtual IEEE International Conference on Rebooting Computing (ICRC), Nov. 2021. To be published in conference proceedings 2022.

It is widely believed that quantum computing is on the threshold of practicality, with performance that will soon greatly surpass that of classical computing. On the contrary, I argue that quantum computing does not currently exist, and probably never will. First, although quantum annealing systems have been demonstrated to solve practical optimization problems, they are actually performing classical analog annealing, with no quantum enhancement. In contrast, while systems of quantum gate arrays, which are expected to perform digital quantum computing, have been fabricated with up to ~ 100 qubits in several technologies, they have not performed any practical computations. This is not merely a question of excess noise; the theory of massive quantum entanglement, necessary for the desired performance, has never been actually been verified. The well-established quantum results such as electronic energy bands do not incorporate quantum entanglement. I suggest that the experimental observations in multi-qubit systems may be explained as the result of delocalized coupled oscillator modes, similar to that in electronic energy bands. Such coupled modes would not yield the exponential increase in degrees of freedom needed for quantum speedup, and hence would not be useful for computing. Tests on these multi-qubit systems should be able to distinguish these two models. The quantum computing research community really needs to address this issue.