Just to offer the poster some balance on this topic, there are a few reasonably non-moronic people heavily focused on consciousness and AI. You might want to look into Sapolsky, Tegmark, and others I cannot recall names for, but they are out there. Many view LLMs as they are today, right now, and say no way, no agency, no sentience, absolutely not, ever. But not only are they changing, there are possibilities for emergence in complex systems. And if you want a little extra companionship for your private sense of curiosity and imagination, just remember that we have no fucking idea yet what consciousness even is, where it comes from, or if is a single mode function, nor any certainty of whether it's a strictly biological function or not.

A lot of folks, smart folks, are vehemently opposed to conscious AI. But consciousness may not even be the only possibility for some other emergent intelligence. They seem far too sure of themselves to me. I say this without even touching on any of my own 'research' and private thinking. There are plenty of non-moronic, or if you prefer, respectable people thinking very seriously about this. So many things, to me, suggest greater wisdom in humility and humbleness than arrogance right now. If you asked many professional developers ten years ago if GPT or Claude would be as it is now, they'd have said no damn way. Things are moving very quickly.