Dr. Peter Boltuc has a PhD in Philosophy and is currently a Professor at University of Illinois Springfield.  His background in Moral and Political Philosophy has leveraged his research into the subjectivity of moral experience and the moral implications of machine consciousness. In this episode, Peter discusses whether machines could ever be granted consciousness.  He believes, hypothetically, that we could create such machines, and elaborates from an ethical perspective on why we may want to “curve moral space” in a way that values human-level sentience and moves us toward living harmoniously with such machines.