Sperm and egg cells, which are almost certainly not conscious, become babies in the right conditions, which are almost certainly conscious.
This is closer to an argument for the existence of consciousness than anything pertaining to AI.
AI might become “conscious” in the future, but you’re assuming that current AI is just one stage in a process - which we have not yet experienced, unlike the other processes mentioned.
Even though through the entire takeoff roll, the plane is just getting lighter and lighter - even after it’s airborne - until the wheels leave the ground it seems to be just a really awkward, noisy bus.
Animals, down to insects, exhibit signs of self awareness and “conscious” behavior. It’s easy to remain incredulous for a variety of reasons, many of which I personally agree with… but I’d say that there appears to be progress towards something we would recognize as consciousness, and the process appears to be ongoing.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/
But that also doesn't really address the process critique that my comment was about, which is a different argument form.
This kind of goes into the whole research field of António Damásio on consciousness.
We can easily assess if a human is conscious from a medical point of view. But do we have a deterministic test to prove an abstract entity is conscious?
We can’t. We can infer, from what they say and whether they’re ambulatory, that they’re probably conscious. But we often get it wrong. Empirically, we aren’t that far ahead of Descartes.
Well, we can for *some* of the 40 different definitions of the word.
But there are people who are misdiagnosed to be in a vegetative state who later wake up and report experiences from when they appeared so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetative_state#Misdiagnoses
Are you conscious when you dream, or is it just a memory replayed by your waking mind? Or only when it's a lucid dream? Or are lucid dreams themselves just the illusion of consciousness?
What about when you sleepwalk?
What about hypnopompic and hypnogogic states?
What about chemically altered consciousness like blind drunk, stoned, tripping on LSD?