Will AI ever = conciousness or sentience?

[Whateverist]

I still don't get it, how can we say on the one hand that we don't understand consciousness but on the other that a simulation is not consciousness? What else are we referring to but the effect? Let me rephrase, in what way does the simulation differ from "the genuine article"? I'm not asking anybody to be right, or put forward some nobel worthy shit. I'd just like to hear more opinions (and disagreements) of what makes their consciousness "genuine", or different somehow from AI.

First, thanks for helping me think this through. I need the challenge since what I think seems to me both obvious and hard to articulate.

What else are we referring to but the effect?

First and foremost I think we are referring to an immediate, subjective experience of being a being. We're in the world responding to shit. We find that stuff matters to us. So we might ask, how come? Reflection might reveal an element of upbringing, or, a moving play or book or relationship which may have had an impact on what matters to us. But it might also just strike us as stemming from normal mammalian drives or we might just not have any damned idea at all.

So what I think of as consciousness or sentience includes all of these things. We have an experience of what it feels like for a thing to matter. We recognize that it is our self, a particular being, which is having this reaction. It isn't the room I'm in which is hungry or feeling threatened, it's me ... this upright naked ape. We can reflect on how earlier experiences have shaped our response and sometimes, I think, that reflection can change our future experience of what matters.

I can imagine a program that would simulate these outwardly visible effects but I can't imagine why I should think that the effects correspond to the actual experience.

You might wonder if this leaves me a solipsist toward other people or animals but I would answer not at all. There is every reason to suppose your insides feel and work the way mine do. There is no reason I can imagine why I should think a machine or program which I understand has been constructed to mimic our outward appearance of being conscious actually is so.

- Doubtful in Berkeley.