An artificial consciousness (AC) is an artificial system theoretically capable of achieving all known obectively observable abilities of consciousness by creating rules in all possible circumstances based on the information it gathers. This field of study includes research aiming to create and study such systems in order to understand corresponding natural mechanisms.
The term "artificial consciousness" was used for the first time by Professor Igor Aleksander of London Imperial College, who in his book Impossible Minds (IC Press 1996) stated that the principles for creating a conscious machine already existed but that it would take forty years to train a machine to understand language.
