[Suicide Junkie]

One way to put it is that consciousness is something that has to have the time to consider itself. If a complex task is performed too quickly it doesn't have enough time to displat the emergent property of consciousness. It may be that computers are finishing their tasks before they have a chance to be more than their task.

It sounds to me like the speed is not the problem here. Doing it faster means more time left over. The problem would be the narrow-mindedness, where the computer immediately stops thinking about all of the information it just processed in order to concentrate 100% on the next problem. Even if that problem is just watching the clock and waiting for input.

I'm not sure how you'd go about coding it to think about what it's doing... some set of parallel processors inspecting the incoming codes, perhaps an evolutionary programming system where it takes the majority decision of the currently top-ranked algorithms. (Ranked via various needs sensors, and perhaps a pair of "good bot"/"bad bot" social buttons on the front)