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AI is on the verge of self-awareness

Not even close!

To be aware, an entity needs to be organic, and have a conscience and be able to experience emotions, and mostly love. AI is just programming of devices (computers or whatever) and those devices are composed of materials that can never have or get emotions, or draw from experiences of self and from all the history that man created.

The more sophisticated programming that is being called AI, is just more of the same as before, but tackling more advanced jobs. AI has existed for a long time, but wasn't called AI, such as taking orders at a restaurant or recognizing faces to open doors.

More advanced programming of other tasks, does not equate to intelligence. It is just programming to handle a lot of the mundane tasks which in some cases people thought required some intelligence. Reading books aloud used to be thought as requiring intelligence. Interpreting from one language to another was also thought to require intelligence. Understanding the spoken word and then responding with a corresponding but expected action, such as doing a flight reservation, was thought to require intelligence. People have been doing a lot of tasks which can now be automated and taken over by sophisticated programming. Sophisticated programming is not intelligence that makes the robot or machine 'aware' or that approaches human intelligence. Even a fly has a lot more intelligence than what's exhibited by the current AI features.

Take the most advanced computer or smartphone, and put it out on a mountaintop, and have it facing the heavens full of specs (stars, galaxies, etc), and then see if it can come up with conclusions of its own about what it is observing. Have any other type of AI and put in in a forest and wait to see if it can draws its own conclusions about what is around.

Diagnosing for cancers is thought to be an intelligent action, but, it's just advanced programming that uses what was known before, and can be done more quickly and more efficiently and precisely than humans. It's artificial, but not intelligence that didn't come from humans.