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Hello, it's 31 years since Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke gave us Hal, the archetypal thinking computer of the film 2001, a space odyssey.

But as we head towards the millennium, are we any nearer to achieving the thinking, feeling computer? Or is it just a dream? And should it remain one?

Ego Alexander is one of the leading figures in artificial intelligence. Professor at Imperial College London, he's credited as being the first person to design a computer which could recognize a human face.

He's also the inventor of Magnus, a neural computer which he says is an artificially conscious machine, his country writing a book called Towards Conscious Machines.

The philosopher John Sirl has been described as being an avowed enemy of artificial intelligence. He invented an argument which he said to destroy the plausibility of the idea of conscious machines.

It's called the Chinese Room Argument. Currently, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Barclay, his publications are numerous, he's just published mind, language and society.

Ego Alexander, can you tell us the difference between machine consciousness and human consciousness?

Yes, it's every bit of difference in the world. The reason we talk about machine consciousness at all is because it tells us something about real consciousness.

What we do on a computer is to basically simulate the biological end of the brain because in 40 years of artificial intelligence, this has been sadly lacking people have been writing programs which do smart things.

And they might even beat Casper of a chess, but they haven't really handled the way in which biology creates consciousness.

Now, what we do in artificially conscious systems, we basically simulate the brain and allow some behaviors to emerge from that.

And we then study these behaviors and say, oh, that's a bit like consciousness in a human being, or it isn't at all.

And it's which structures of the brain give us more of a conscious type behavior that are interesting and those that give us less.

That gives us a bit of a handle on the biological basis of consciousness. But the computer and the machine almost get out of that equation.

So you're saying that a conscious machine is an oxymoron?

Well, it's an interesting oxymoron. I like to think that in fact it does make sense as long as you use, you put the word artificial in enormous capital letters and consciousness in tiny little nine point print.

The object of the exercise is to give us a bit more understanding of ourselves.

Of course, as soon as you say the words artificially conscious machine, people think that you're building something that looks a bit like Schwarzenegger.

And it's going to rush out of the studio and kill everybody. And that's a great big misunderstanding in what we're trying to do.

We haven't quite got around to that yet.

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