Human activities are progressively defined by interactions with products that embed increasingly higher levels of immaterial component (software, patents, design principles and patterns). After presenting the continuity between seminal concepts in Cybernetics, Information Theory, Network Analysis, AI practices on one side and cognitive behaviour by leveraging a minimalist approach to cybernetic systems based on the concept of capacity of network; the text tries to establish the concept of interface to define logical rule-based automata that can be considered shareable instances of a self-model approach to consciousness: in first instance, a rule-based descriptive construct for an ‘economy of information exchange’ between systems (or an ‘economy of time’), and in second instance a rule-based framework for approaching the hard problem of consciousness. These are critical waypoints in navigating fast-growing knowledge-intensive landscapes. This review into patterns of growing complexity is concluded with an hypothesis that aims to extend Ashby’s definition of machine to include interfaces to enable self-modeling for possibly intelligent digital machines. Starting from this background, conclusion tries to define a clearer pathway to tackle the difficult problems about the positioning of biological and digital machines in what the paper points out to be the sentience-intelligence-consciousness spectrum.