Will AI ever = conciousness or sentience?

[Ryantology]

I of course think you are conflating expert processing with something much more subjective in nature. Outward appearances will never provide adequate support for the existence of subjective states. It would be a much easier task to program a machine to fool a human observer than it would be to create the conditions where a contemplation program corresponds to anything near what we ourselves mean by contemplation.

No, you could not prove that a machine is conscious simply by intuition, of course, nor even cite it as evidence. What I am saying is that if you have a machine which behaves in such a way that the average person believes it is conscious based on it displaying characteristics so similar to what we call 'consciousness' in humans that the only obvious difference is that it is not biological, what do we do?

It's not an empty question, either; quite a few of our more important moral functions are conditional based on our perception of this. Many people have no moral qualm with the slaughter of animals for food because we tend to look at their consciousness as inferior to our own, thanks mainly to the apparent lack of (or greatly reduced) sentience. If you have an AI which seems humanlike in every regard, do we have to consider whether or not it has rights? Is it still a machine we can shut off and dismantle whenever we want? Can we make that decision on the basis of "we cannot prove it is conscious" if we cannot prove it within humans?

I think it might be a very sticky situation at some point, and if we achieve apparent consciousness in a machine before we can understand the mechanisms of consciousness, would it be ethical to treat machine intelligence as if it was lesser in value than our own?

Fooling a human observer is beside the point, though an interesting challenge for AI in its own right.

I don't know if it is beside the point, as there certainly are people who would be convinced enough by a machine's personhood to fight for its rights.

In any case, we have interesting times ahead.