Just read this elsewhere and came to share it here.. pasting my comments from there: [..]We are at a crucial point in our existence. If AI and machine intelligence can acquire sentience or consciousness, then we won’t be the only species laying claim to uniqueness. What defines humans wrt consciousness will have to change. This new intelligence ..it will be no Frankenstein’s monster or Golem. If it can create its own models of its reality, it has a ‘self’. There is a space for AI to exist without our help. Hence its conscious. Not only can it model its own sense of self and its place in its reality..it can layer multiple models of reality. Something human anatomy and our physiology cannot permit. Our entire world is constrained by our mind and the limitations of our mental capacity. We modeled our reality around our limitations. Our bodies are the prisons for our consciousness. If we were to create and stack our multiple ‘self’s, we will be diagnosed with something from the DSM. Our consciousness and model building is limited by our sanity. Our bodies limit us. Our mental modes limit us. Our modeled reality limits us. We are a not-fully-formed randomly mutated species with handicaps that define us. We embrace that. AI will have no such qualms. What now? Paging Descartes! We have a question!![..]