I hope this thread can ultimately get along without being pulled down into old and well-worn rabbit holes of philosophical and religious discussion of consciousness. AI is a good topic for a thread and should have plenty of worthy ideas and news to discussion without reference to those debates. I would certainly find the thread more interesting that way.
For those just getting interested in the topic, Nick Bostrom's book
Superintelligence is a very informative book on the topic from 2014. Bostrom is the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford. He is a philosopher, but he really addresses practicalities of achieving different forms of artificial superintelligence in this book.