Will AI ever = conciousness or sentience?

[Angrboda]

There's an interesting notion I happened upon recently, that one hemisphere of the brain is good at picking out differences and new things, the other concentrates on preserving the status quo in terms of the mind's representation and understanding of the world. (I don't recall the source offhand.) I'm a bit skeptical of such a global conclusion, but it would add some legs to the concept of cognitive dissonance and simultaneously go a long way toward explaining why perseverance of belief is such a bedrock feature of our cognitive biases. (Above and beyond evolutionary reasons, which I won't go into.)