It's a slim little book but it's a good overview of 'consciousness' as we understand it and as it applies to technologically created intelligences. It addresses fundamental questions like how much does being situated in the world and having means of influencing the world and goals to achieve using that influence contribute to consciousness.
It analyzes the split between the symbolic and subsymbolic AI camps. To be brief the symbolic-AI camp models knowledge as specific, explicitly-represented objective facts that get manipulated by formal, repeatable rules, and the subsymbolic or connectionist camp is all about building systems that adapt, in hard-to-analyze ways, to perform actions and anticipate things in a way that seems to demonstrate knowledge but where the knowledge itself can't easily be understood or extracted as a list of explicit facts or rules. The subsymbolic approach gives rise to belief that an agent must be situated in a world it can perceive and influence, and which it must influence in order to achieve its goals or survive. The symbolic group considers those things to be unnecessary. It's hard to say whether this is a split over whether these methods can achieve consciousness as much as it is a split over what consciousness is in the first place. Either way it's worth considering. Both symbolic and subsymbolic AI, if successful, would be things you can use. The distinction would be that a subsymbolic AI would most likely also be using you.
I consider one of the defining characteristics of "real" or humanlike conciousness to be subjective perceptions, desires and needs and independently wanting things and taking action to achieve them. Predictably I'm part of the subsymbolic camp.
I found the sections on self-prediction and fundamental mechanisms for empathy to work to be interesting and (hopefully) useful. There were a few ideas I hadn't considered there, such as how mimicry contributes to empathy and how comparing analysis of one's own success vs anticipation of one's own success contributes to something like self-consciousness.
What this is NOT, is a technical guide to implementation of anything. That's fine, because it doesn't pretend to be or promise to be. Mostly it's exactly what it says on the label: a review of theories about consciousness and how those theories pertain to artificial consciousness.
I thought it was a bit too brief; I'd like to see expanded consideration of most of these topics. It's an overview, not a reference.
ISBN-13: 978-0262028387
ISBN-10: 0262028387
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