  We report on a series of eight workshops held in the summer of 2017 on the
topic "technology and consciousness." The workshops covered many subjects but
the overall goal was to assess the possibility of machine consciousness, and
its potential implications. In the body of the report, we summarize most of the
basic themes that were discussed: the structure and function of the brain,
theories of consciousness, explicit attempts to construct conscious machines,
detection and measurement of consciousness, possible emergence of a conscious
technology, methods for control of such a technology and ethical considerations
that might be owed to it. An appendix outlines the topics of each workshop and
provides abstracts of the talks delivered.
  Update: Although this report was published in 2018 and the workshops it is
based on were held in 2017, recent events suggest that it is worth bringing
forward. In particular, in the Spring of 2022, a Google engineer claimed that
LaMDA, one of their "large language models" is sentient or even conscious. This
provoked a flurry of commentary in both the scientific and popular press, some
of it interesting and insightful, but almost all of it ignorant of the prior
consideration given to these topics and the history of research into machine
consciousness. Thus, we are making a lightly refreshed version of this report
available in the hope that it will provide useful background to the current
debate and will enable more informed commentary. Although this material is five
years old, its technical points remain valid and up to date, but we have
"refreshed" it by adding a few footnotes highlighting recent developments.
