The sad state of machine consciousness in Science Fiction

Among other things, my novel will concern the idea of whether a machine can be conscious. This is hardly a new idea in science fiction, so why bother? In my opinion the question of how a machine can achieve consciousness has almost never been dealt with well.

In the vast majority of SF novels on the subject the way the machine (usually a big computer) achieves self awareness the same way Herbie The Love Bug does. In other words, magic.

A good example is the book The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein. This is perhaps my favorite Heinlein novel, but it contains a character Mike who is a computer that becomes self aware. The explanation given is that Mike started out as a normal computer but the authorities on the Moon needed to make it more and more powerful and at one point the machine had so much processing power that it just woke up and became Mike.

Back when that novel was written the average person had never seen a computer up close and didn't know anything about how they worked. I'm guessing that Heinlein didn't. In 2013 we have computers far more powerful than anything a Lunar colony would ever need (not to mention the fact that the International Space Station uses laptop computers for most of its computing needs and a Lunar colony would too) but not one of our supercomputers has become self aware.

If you make a big computer you just have a big computer. A big computer is no more likely to achieve consciousness than a vintage Volkswagen Beetle is.

While I can forgive Heinlein for this I have a harder time forgiving the authors that came later and used exactly the same idea, or worse.

Consider SkyNet in the Terminator movies.

Consider Colossus, The Forbin Project. Two supercomputers, one in the U.S. and the other in the U.S.S.R., become one self aware computer when they discover each other and start communicating with each other.

Consider Short Circuit and Short Circuit 2. Apparently in those movies a robot gets hit by lightning and that gets consciousness going. (I haven't seen these movies and don't intend to).

Consider Electric Dreams, a sort of Cyrano de Bergerac story involving a personal computer that becomes self aware when his owner spills champagne on it. (I did go to see this one. Bud Cort plays the computer. It had a decent soundtrack featuring music by Jeff Lynne and others).

Magic. Nothing but magic.

Did anybody do this well? The only one I'm aware of is The Two Faces of Tomorrow by James P. Hogan.

Maybe my novel can be a second example of a good treatment of this idea. That's my hope, anyway.

So what does the future of the Hare Krishna movement have to do with this?

What indeed?