I think the author is being a bit fast and loose with Koch's quotes. Koch is not postulating that computers can never be conscious, he's generally saying curren

I think the author is being a bit fast and loose with Koch's quotes. Koch is not postulating that computers can never be conscious, he's generally saying current approaches to making computer systems are not based on feedback hence can't be conscious because IIT requires feedback. This paraphrase "Koch believes the theory establishes that machines built along the lines of our current silicon-chip technology can never become conscious, no matter what awesome degree of processing power they possess." would seem to come from this statement: "Whether or not a network has this property of influencing itself depends on its architecture. If information is merely “fed forward” to convert inputs to outputs, as in digital computers, then IIT insists it can only generate zombie intelligence." However all IIT (and presumably therefore Koch) requires we do to solve this is use a different architecture (i.e. some kind of self-modifying feedback approach in the computer). "In Koch’s words, consciousness is “a system’s ability to be acted upon by its own state in the past and to influence its own future.”"