It's all relays, self analysis and processing proggrammed hardware with software.
Perhaps we are all this as well and consciousness is an illusion?
The machine will never have consciousness and ability to truly learn and understand what it is learning.
Perhaps for a turing machine, but I think your are wrong about all machines, as we are machines, therefor machines have already achieved consciousness. Even if only a biological or analog machine is the only thing that can achieve consciousness eventually technology will make it, if technology continues to progress as it does.
Unless your saying we have properties that make us conscious that are beyond the physical realm and thus can never be replicated or emulated, I'm not sure this is true but I think it worth testing. If we ever do make a Strong AI that is as smart or smarter than any human in every way and that claims to be conscious we must accept these conclusions:
1) Conscious can be an illusion, as the AI thinks it conscious but we disagree, ergo we may also be delusional about are own consciousness.
2) Consciousness is completely physical and can be replicated with known machinery (as opposed to the present state of biology which has unknowns) and thus a soul is irrelevant.
Certainly these are answer that could radically change our philosophy and theology, scary answers in fact, but I'm going to wait and see if these answers are true or not before passing judgment on them.
I do enjoy playing vs chess AI's but they are still cheaters.
It cheating only if consciousness is required to play a game.
Some people put too much blind trust into what technology can do - and this is a good example of that. We cannot even figure out what consciousness IS - much less create it in a machine. :shrug:
We don't need to know what it is, we could still replicate it via a black box system, many evolving programs for example already derive answers from which the creators are baffled at how it came to those answers. We don't know if consciousness is an emergent property that a machine sophisticated enough might not simply become self aware.