Here's the problem with AI in a nutshell, right here. The people developing it can't even acknowledge the existence of consciousness because they have no answer for it. They think if they can just cram a machine full of so much information that it'll magically achieve sentience, which is nonsense.
But any time legitimate and self-evident criticisms of their project are raised, their response is to diminish the human. The AI project will not birth machines that think like humans but humans that think like machines.

