Will AI ever = conciousness or sentience?

[Whateverist]

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?

Well we might at least reasonably treat it as though it was not mortal and did not feel pain. Those seem like pretty important criteria by which to differentiate between how we treat (hypothetically) conscious machines from humans and other biological creatures.

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.

I suspect you will be disappointed on this score at least but .. here's to interesting times.