While the West still doesn’t have clear tools to measure consciousness (though Eastern philosophy has been tackling this stuff systematically for thousands of years), I think we can just focus on two big things for this debate: AI’s ability to deeply understand meaning and know itself. That’s probably close enough to human awareness without getting lost in the philosophy of what human consciousness really is.
I don’t think AI needs to fully copy or match human consciousness. If it can just have some kind of 'self-awareness' and 'deep understanding of meaning,' that’s probably enough to start deciding on things like moral status. And I don’t think AI’s moral status (if it gets one) has to be equal to humans. I feel that it might not even take decades, because I feel like AI’s smarts (even if it’s just mimicking) are already growing so fast that regular people can hardly keep up.
I think Big Tech is trying hard to make super intelligent AI soon. It’s hard to avoid the questions Anthropic brings up. At some point, we’ll have to talk about whether AI should have moral rights, even if it’s not really 'conscious' like humans. We need to figure out what AI consciousness should be. If AI can understand meaning deeply in its digital way (not like human) and starts to know itself or even know that it knows itself, not just copying like today’s AI models, isn’t that kind of like human self-awareness "รู้ตัว" and meta-awareness "สติ", even if it’s different physically?