I recommend you research consciousness. My present understanding is that neural networks are not potential to creating artificial consciousness, because consciousness provably does not arise in brains, which is the model neural networks use.

Stephan Wolfram, one of the premier AI researchers, has published his thoughts on what AI is today, and his assessment is that it's essentially a weighting algorithm. There is no potential for consciousness in digital weighting algorithms any more than there is in analog weighting mechanisms. Consciousness is not an electrical field, it is not a chemical process, and we know these things because we have significant abilities to alter both, and cannot change consciousness by those means. We can destroy the ability of living things to express their consciousness, but that isn't affecting consciousness itself directly. The only way we can detect consciousness presently is very indirect and inadequate, which makes the confusion about AI inevitable. We can only detect consciousness in beings capable of taking actions we can observe that reveal they learn and make conscious decisions. We cannot ascertain if trees or rocks have consciousness, because they are physically incapable of taking actions that reveal these traits. AI can emulate such traits. That's what it does, so it appears by our extraordinarily feeble detection abilities to be conscious. That appearance is false, and simply reflects our incapacity and nescience regarding consciousness.

Thanks!