Can computers and artificial intelligence develop consciousness?

No. Consciousness depends on having a personality of one’s own, and that grows out of a life actually lived, out of birth, childhood, pain and joy. A computer can store a vast amount of knowledge, but it cannot experience any of it.

We often hear that computers will soon have a consciousness of their own. Films like to play with this idea. But what is consciousness really? It is more than processing data. It requires a personality, a self that experiences.

That personality grows out of life itself. A human being has parents and is born. They are a child, they learn, they fall and get up again. They feel pain and remember it. They experience joy and carry it within them. Take all of that away and nothing of consciousness remains.

You can feed a computer an unimaginable amount of information. It can calculate, sort and answer. But it has no parents and no birth. It was never a child. It does not suffer, and it remembers no pain and no happiness. What it “knows” it has never lived through. That is why it cannot have a personality of its own or a consciousness. Many scientists, too, consider a conscious machine impossible for exactly this reason.

The Holy Qur’an says that God breathed into man of His spirit, and it reminds us that our knowledge of the soul is small. Consciousness is not a component that could be rebuilt. If it were otherwise, and machines truly gained a consciousness of their own, that would be a serious danger for the world. But it will not come to that. Computers remain useful tools in human hands.