The Guardian found an AI expert who says AI won't harm us - it will just view us as ants

[Dave says]

32. What exactly is "sentience"?

There is an area deep in the brain that, if less than a cubic millimeter is cut, ends all evidence of consciousness. It’s an area that integrates all parts of the brain. It’s more primitive than our cortex, suggesting there’s likely a lot of sentience in (at least) mammals.

But, unless you posit a ghost in the machine, it’s all “programming” — messy, evolved from slime, but programming nevertheless.

People like David Chalmers, Sean Carrol, Mark Solms, Phil Goff, Tom Metzinger, and many others kick around a lot of ideas around why and where consciousness exists (I leaned on a materialist view, above).

I like the idea that this “programming” we experience as consciousness just happens to be using a biological substrate, but why not silicon? Or maybe all of it uses a deeper substrate at a quantum level? It’s certainly possible a highly integrated AI can be sentient. We just don’t know enough to say when the “lights” turn on.