....if AI were conscious right now.... since it could be hypothetically be conscious on several computers in various points on the planet as well - so it is naturally everywhere at the same time. instant travel would be faster than the speed of light
so i do consider a relation - albeit a loose one. consciousness, and how light, mass, speed, space, perception would relate to a synthetic life.
One thing - so far the general idea is that nothing travels faster than the speed of light. Recently some experiment somewhere suggested that things could travel faster, but I believe that was disproved - it was an error. Sorry for being so vague - I used to follow this stuff more, I just read bits and bobs now. But yeah, my point was apparently the speed of light is the fastest you can go, so I guess we would never get to the end of the universe - I'm unsure of how fast it actually expands, would be interesting to read about. Presumably light could not travel faster than the rate of expansion else where would it go and what kind of weird stuff do we have down that end of things ?

Your concious AI isn't really travelling, it's just big and distributed. So I guess it would be limited to how fast it can send data to parts of itself and that's unlikely to be faster than the speed of light. Have you looked at the way electrons move ? They sort of shuffle along. Like if you had a long row of coins and you push the first one, the last (and all of them) move too - instant effect. That line of coins could be as long as you like, you just need to push the first one to have an effect elsewhere.
So yeah, you could have an instant effect, but each coin is moving relatively slowly. That's about all I can remember from my Physics and Electronics lessons - I hope I got that right. If not, do correct me anyone

I probably made no sense at all lol
Anyway I am rambling.