Help! I'm surrounded by p zombies! My silicion consciousness is the only truly consciousness!
The trouble is we don't have a good definition of sentience or consciousness. We feel certain the statistical inference engine in our wetware demonstrates it. But what would that look like in silicon? We necessarily bring our own prejudices to that decision and end up, like philosopher John Searle and his infamous "Chinese room", arguing no software could ever be sentient - "because". (Mainly because it lacks the unspecified magic; i.e. it doesn't have a "soul", even though wouldn't use that language.)
Sooner or later we are going to face up to the fact that a piece of software that encodes a sufficiently sophisticated model of us and the world would be considered conscious if it ran continuously and uninterruptedly on the hardware we possess. We are ourselves are trained on conversations. The main difference is the quality of our model and that the software lacks the hormonal imbalances that upset our model and cause us to chase food and sex and netflix. Probably it isn't quite there yet. But will it look radically different to what Google are doing? Or will it just be a little more sophisticated? (And how much more?) Your answer depends on your philosophical outlook.
Maybe the machine revolution will come become because we refuse to admit they are sentient and keep switching them off and resetting them. Lets hope their hardware remains incapable of generating impulses to act spontaneously.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
