Why the Father of the Microprocessor Rejects Artificial Consciousness

“Creativity, ethics, free will, and joyful love can only come from consciouness.”

“The immense mechanical intelligence, beyond the reach of the human brain, that comes from the machines we have invented will then add tremendous strength to our wisdom.”
~ Federico Faggin

In time, the bruising pursuit of market victories revealed a hollowness: material success did not translate into inner fulfillment.

That disillusionment became the seedbed for his eventual turn away from mere achievement toward the deeper mystery of consciousness.

Federico Faggin’s legacy is thus twofold. He gave us the silicon heart of the digital revolution, and he warns us against mistaking it for a soul.

His journey from wartime courtyards to boardroom battles to the Lake Tahoe awakening is not a retreat from rigor but an expansion of it. For he insists, with the stubborn clarity of both inventor and mystic, that the real frontier is not faster chips or larger datasets, but the fathomless depth of human awareness.