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Consciousness in higher animals, typically characterized by a 100 millisecond time constant, is, by necessity, a greatly simplified and stripped-down version of more complex multiple tunable workspace cognition/regulation dyads like wound healing, immune function, gene expression, institutional function and the like. These more complex dynamic entities emerged through evolutionary exaptation of the inevitable information crosstalk between coresident cognitive modules. In consequence of the severely debrided nature of consciousness, it should not be difficult to construct a fast, single workspace ‘conscious machine’ that mimics the human tunable neuronal global workspace system. Like innate and acquired immune cognition, such a construction could be tied to a ‘backbrain’ AI that has learned hyperrapid stereotypic pattern responses to some particular set of likely challenges. The result would be an ‘emotional’ conscious machine. A particularly clever designer, however, may want to use available high-speed electronics to mimic—or even extend—the more capable multiple-workspace/workforce systems inherently less susceptible to inattentional blindness and related failings of overfocus and thrashing when interacting with an embedding environment that imposes it’s own grammar and syntax. Contrary to current social construction, the actual utility of a ‘conscious machine’ remains obscure, beyond raising a sudden influx of venture capital. Here, we explore these matters in formal detail, restricting argument to the asymptotic limit theorems of information and control theories.