You may infer from my title that my talk is not going to excite anyone about the possibility of conscious machines or a future in which there are self-aware robots that may or may not plot to take over the human world. I shall argue that we will never create machines that have something we would recognise as being conscious, even in a way that falls far short of human consciousness.
Much of the talk will be devoted to explaining how so many people have come to believe in the possibility of conscious machines.