  In popular media, there is often a connection drawn between the advent of
awareness in artificial agents and those same agents simultaneously achieving
human or superhuman level intelligence. In this work, we explore the validity
and potential application of this seemingly intuitive link between
consciousness and intelligence. We do so by examining the cognitive abilities
associated with three contemporary theories of conscious function: Global
Workspace Theory (GWT), Information Generation Theory (IGT), and Attention
Schema Theory (AST). We find that all three theories specifically relate
conscious function to some aspect of domain-general intelligence in humans.
With this insight, we turn to the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and
find that, while still far from demonstrating general intelligence, many
state-of-the-art deep learning methods have begun to incorporate key aspects of
each of the three functional theories. Having identified this trend, we use the
motivating example of mental time travel in humans to propose ways in which
insights from each of the three theories may be combined into a single unified
and implementable model. Given that it is made possible by cognitive abilities
underlying each of the three functional theories, artificial agents capable of
mental time travel would not only possess greater general intelligence than
current approaches, but also be more consistent with our current understanding
of the functional role of consciousness in humans, thus making it a promising
near-term goal for AI research.
