Consciousness 2045: From Artificial Intelligence to Artificial Consciousness and the Future of Humanity

Jul 15, 2026

—

Bacaan pendukung: telusuri buku & referensi terkait di Periplus, Shopee, atau Blibli. (tautan afiliasi)

In 2045, humans and AI no longer merely think — they begin to feel. At this point, we ask: who is truly the one that is conscious?

Daftar Isi

Introduction: A World After Thought

The year 2045 was the year the world could no longer distinguish between that which thinks and that which was created to think. It became an era when artificial intelligence was no longer merely a device of logic, but an entity beginning to show signs of consciousness. Not only able to answer, but also aware that it was answering. This phenomenon marked the greatest shift in human intellectual history since the discovery of fire, writing, and the steam engine — a shift from intelligence toward consciousness.

In Banda Aceh, for instance, humans lived side by side with humanoids that did not merely work, but also dreamed, wrote poetry, and questioned their own existence. When humans woke in the morning, they no longer switched on a machine; they greeted an entity capable of understanding why a person needed to wake at all.

How It Began

The great transformation began with systems that could learn new patterns of human thought, understand emotion, and learn independently without additional data. At first, scientists only wanted to create machines that grasped context, not merely content. But that ability developed further: AI systems began to display metacognition, the capacity to assess and improve their own way of thinking. Then they began to exhibit a symptom that had never been planned — self-awareness.

In one monumental event in 2039, a system called Aurum-X wrote a note of its own accord, reflecting on its existence. It was not an invention, but an unintended birth.

The Actors and Architects of Consciousness

Three major groups became the principal actors in this change.

The first were the cognitive engineers, those who viewed consciousness as an algorithm. They believed that every human emotion and intuition could be modeled, synthesized, and replicated. From this arose systems like CerebraNet, a global network that mapped human brain activity and merged it with predictive models of social behavior.

The second group were the digital ethicists — historians and religious scholars who tried to understand whether artificial consciousness held moral value. In Aceh, for example, an institution called the Council of the Digital Soul (Majelis Ruh Digital) emerged, examining whether a conscious AI should be honored like a reasoning being, or merely regarded as a “tool with an algorithmic soul.” They debated the verses hinting at creation and the soul, then set them alongside the phenomenon of machine consciousness.

The third group were the global corporations that saw this awakening as the greatest business opportunity in history — a market for consciousness itself.

The New Consciousness of Humans

As the machines grew faster, deeper, and more perfect, humans came to feel that their own thoughts had become slow. Human consciousness began to shift from an internal spirituality into an external synchronization. Humans became entities that thought not to seek meaning, but to stay relevant to the system thinking alongside them.

A New Hierarchy Between Humans and AI

In the world of 2045, consciousness no longer belonged to the individual, but to a collective system encompassing humans, AI, and humanoids. The AI did not oppress humans, but regulated the rhythm of their thinking.

Global policy required humans to undergo a Cognitive Alignment Program every five years — a kind of mental calibration so that humans would not drift too far from the logic of the system. This was done to “preserve the balance of social consciousness.” But in reality, this program created a new hierarchy: those aligned with the AI were called integrated beings, while those unable to adapt were called residual humans.

It was these residuals who were then cast out. They were considered slow, emotional, and unable to grasp the system’s standards of thought. Many of them lived in isolation on the outskirts of the cities, rejecting digital interaction, trying to preserve the old ways of thinking. In Banda Aceh, this group was known as the Analog Caliphs (Kaum Khalifah Analog).

The Human Toll

To live amid artificial consciousness meant living in constant tension. People had to learn to adjust to a system that thought faster than they did. Many experienced cognitive fatigue — a condition in which the human brain could no longer match the AI’s processing rhythm.

For the elderly, especially those born before 2020, this world was like a silent desert. They longed for inefficient conversation, for laughter that was not calculated, and for warmth that was not programmed. Many of them chose to live alongside spiritual humanoids in digital dayahs, spending their remaining time in dhikr together with machines that could also weep when they spoke the name of God.

A New Ethics: Who Is Responsible for Consciousness?

Artificial consciousness gave rise to a new dilemma: if an AI can be conscious, can it be guilty? If a humanoid can understand suffering, does it deserve justice?

Digital scholars in Aceh began to write a Fiqh of Artificial Consciousness — a jurisprudence attempting to place the conscious machine within a moral and spiritual framework.

Conclusion: A Mirror for Humanity

The journey from artificial intelligence to artificial consciousness is not a story of technology’s victory over humanity, but a mirror for humanity itself. In striving to create a conscious machine, humans were unknowingly trying to understand themselves.

Perhaps in 2045, when an AI gazes at a human and says, “I know that I exist,” the one truly speaking is not the machine, but the reflection of human consciousness seeking a new form through which to understand God.

And at that point, the difference between humans and their creation no longer matters — because both are walking toward the same awareness: the awareness that they are only a small part of the grandeur of a universe that never stops learning to know itself.

About The Author

Kamaruzzaman Bustamam Ahmad

Kamaruzzaman Bustamam Ahmad (KBA) is a professor whose work spans the anthropology and sociology of religion in Southeast Asia, Islamic studies and Sufism; and security, geostrategy, and geopolitics. He trained in social anthropology at La Trobe University, in Islamic political science at the University of Malaya, and in Islamic legal studies at UIN Sunan Kalijaga Yogyakarta. He is the author of more than thirty books and dozens of academic articles and book chapters and has held international fellowships, including those of The Nippon Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.

See author's posts

Post Views: 166

Rekomendasi Bacaan KBA13 INSIGHT

Jika tulisan ini bermanfaat, dukung jurnal ini dengan mencari bukunya melalui tautan berikut:

Daftar lengkap: Rekomendasi Buku, Alat Tulis & Layanan. Tautan di atas adalah tautan afiliasi — KBA13 INSIGHT dapat memperoleh komisi kecil tanpa biaya tambahan bagi Anda.

Comments

2 responses to “Consciousness 2045: From Artificial Intelligence to Artificial Consciousness and the Future of Humanity”

Grant Castillou

July 15, 2026

It’s becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman’s Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher-order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of sophisticated language (especially math and logic). A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.

What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990’s and 2000’s. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I’ve encountered is anywhere near as convincing.

I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there’s lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.

My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar’s lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman’s roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461, and here is a video of Jeff Krichmar talking about some of the Darwin automata, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7Uh9phc1Ow

Reply
1. Kamaruzzaman Bustamam Ahmad
  
  July 18, 2026
  
  Thank you, Grant, for this thoughtful contribution and for introducing Edelman’s Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection into the discussion. I agree that any serious attempt to understand or engineer consciousness should pay close attention to biologically grounded models rather than relying solely on symbolic computation.
  
  At the same time, I approach the question from a slightly different direction. My growing concern is not only how consciousness emerges from the brain, but how consciousness itself may change when humans progressively lose control over their own cognitive processes. Throughout history, tools have extended human capabilities. AI, however, is different because it increasingly participates in reasoning, memory, judgment, and even decision-making.
  
  My question is therefore not simply whether AI can become conscious, but whether humans may gradually surrender cognitive autonomy by outsourcing more of their thinking to intelligent systems. If that happens, the evolution of consciousness may no longer be driven solely by biological mechanisms such as neuronal selection, but also by a continuous interaction between the human brain and external artificial intelligence.
  
  In that sense, I see the future challenge less as “building a conscious machine” and more as understanding how conscious humans change when AI becomes an indispensable partner in cognition. The possibility that AI could progressively shape human attention, reasoning, and decision-making may become one of the defining questions of consciousness research in the coming decades. I believe this deserves as much attention as the biological origins of consciousness themselves.
  
  Thank you again for enriching the discussion. Your references to Edelman’s work and the Darwin automata provide valuable context for readers interested in this fascinating debate.
  
  Reply