A different question is whether consciousness is something desirable in machines. As an exercise in playing with that question, Peter Watts' fiction is hard to

A different question is whether consciousness is something desirable in machines. As an exercise in playing with that question, Peter Watts' fiction is hard to beat. As one distillation he presents goes, first-contact comes about because of our emissions being noticed. But the reason for the contact is the content of the messages - intelligent but not-conscious beings receive them, find them difficult to process because they are mostly self-referential silliness only a conscious mind could worry about, and conclude they are informational attacks. Maybe machines shouldn't be conscious, because consciousness is a waste of resources.