I agree that conscious machines (if such a thing is possible) will probably not be carefully designed by humans. That said, I think you should be a little more

I agree that conscious machines (if such a thing is possible) will probably not be carefully designed by humans. That said, I think you should be a little more critical of deep learning. So-called neural networks are more meaningfully described as high-dimensional curve fits. When people "train" neural networks, they're fitting the parameters of a model (just like y = a*x + b is a model with a and b as parameters) to some data. The results are impressive, and sometimes downright spooky, but neural networks are closer in spirit to a curve fit in MS Excel than they are to a real brain. There is no deep why. These are just nested compositions of affine transformations and ramp functions.