I have a hypothesis on how computers could gain sentience

[Alex K]

That these types of machines achieve such a state doesn't seem more likely to me than a high end OCR software doing it. Neither has the capacity to, metaphorically, say "Oh sod it, I didn't wanna do this!". Their tasks are too specific and limited. You don't have one unified AI Leviathan living in the Google mainframe figuring out the human condition, it's a bunch of algorithms getting fed numbers and spitting out others. These may be AIs learning patterns in the data they are fed, but they are not set up to learn what they themselves are doing. Methinks.