In this talk, I shall critically review recent literature on the possibility of building conscious machines, starting from our knowledge of the evolutionary origins of sentience. In particular, I shall draw on Ginsburg and Jablonka’s (2019) Unlimited Associative Learning (UAL) framework, Bronfman et al.’s (2021) extension of the UAL framework to robotic devices, and Man and Damasio’s (2019) work on soft robotics. These accounts point to promising directions for future research in Artificial Life. However, I shall argue that the actual realisation of robotic devices that exhibit UAL would ultimately pose a challenge to the UAL framework itself.