I worry that we don't have a very good definition of consciousness yet which makes it hard to tackle.

A big part of my job is to remember failure, and reboot failure, when the timing is right.

We don't have a "consciousness meter" that'll tell us exactly how conscious something is. I think we might get there eventually.

Remember, when we're conscious of something, that state is quite often generated by unconscious processes that happen right before it.

I spend a lot of time going over old conversation summaries. A lot of the old ones are about ideas that ended in failure, the project didn't work. But hey, you know what? That was five years ago, and now computers are faster, or some new information has come along, the world is different. So we're able to reboot the project.

If we succeed, it makes no sense to keep it only for ourselves.

You can imagine over very long timescales, perhaps far beyond the multi-decade time scale, we might be able to ask very deep questions about why we feel the way we feel about things, or why we think of ourselves in certain ways - questions that have been in the realm of psychology and philosophy but have been very difficult to get a firm mechanistic laws-of-physics grasp on.