Ignoring you're question; AI isn't as much about machine consciousness and human-like intelligence as people like to think. Theres a lot of very good AI used every day: classifiers, pattern recognition, googles pagerank, recommendation systems, optimization algorithms and so on.
On to your question: Do I think something that looks like consciousness is possible? Yes. How soon depends on how conscious it looks and how much this is faked and real.
I think we're still a bit of a way away, but it will happen. Do I think the machine will be actually conscious like humans? No, I don't. Appearance and actually being are different things. A machine can be programmed to appear conscious by following decision making patterns similar to humans, by incorporating emotion (perhaps as a weighting system to deal with certain scenarios, or maybe not include emotion at all and go for pure practical efficiency..), self preservation, priorities and so on. But, this won't make them conscious like a human. I think theres more than a biological computer in us humans. Religious people like to call it a soul; I prefer to use that term to refer to some overall control system which is outside of the biological control systems: if the brain and nervous system is our hardware and our thought processes our software, then the soul is our firmware. I don't think we will ever completely understand what makes us conscious, for this reason, and therefore cannot ever make truely conscious machines BUT I believe we will, eventually, get very close to it.
On to your question: Do I think something that looks like consciousness is possible? Yes. How soon depends on how conscious it looks and how much this is faked and real.
I think we're still a bit of a way away, but it will happen. Do I think the machine will be actually conscious like humans? No, I don't. Appearance and actually being are different things. A machine can be programmed to appear conscious by following decision making patterns similar to humans, by incorporating emotion (perhaps as a weighting system to deal with certain scenarios, or maybe not include emotion at all and go for pure practical efficiency..), self preservation, priorities and so on. But, this won't make them conscious like a human. I think theres more than a biological computer in us humans. Religious people like to call it a soul; I prefer to use that term to refer to some overall control system which is outside of the biological control systems: if the brain and nervous system is our hardware and our thought processes our software, then the soul is our firmware. I don't think we will ever completely understand what makes us conscious, for this reason, and therefore cannot ever make truely conscious machines BUT I believe we will, eventually, get very close to it.