Can AI — and Human beings _ become truly conscious and self-aware?

Question from the Internet:

“Can artificial intelligence ever achieve true consciousness and self-awareness?”

I really do not know. But I think, first, we would need to focus on human beings achieving true consciousness and self-awareness.

As long as we remain “unconscious” — blindly and instinctively following our inherently self-serving, self-justifying, egocentric, and individualistic nature with its subjective “pleasure/pain” calculations — and as long as we remain “quasi-intelligent” — meaning believing in the omnipotence of our intellectual capabilities while destroying everything including ourselves in a totally wanton way — and as long as we have absolutely no awareness of who we are and for what purpose we were born and why we are called “Human beings,” how can we even imagine creating an entity, a creation of our own that possesses self-awareness and true consciousness?!

We keep inventing all kinds of ‘things” and create hysteria around them to avoid researching and answering all the above questions and unsolved “mysteries” about our own existence. We keep running away from the questions about the “meaning and purpose” of our human lives.

We would rather drown ourselves in the 24/7 brainwashing Matrix, and we would rather hand over our existence to the mighty AI, but we can’t face the very disturbing and unsettling questions about the “meaning and purpose” of our lives.

But the problem is that we are fast running out of time. We are on a seemingly inevitable path towards self-destruction since we refuse to look into ourselves and try to understand why we keep doing what we are doing and how we could change and further develop ourselves in order to avoid a global catastrophe.

AI cannot help us in this adventure. AI is a very limited “super-computer” we created, and it can only rehash the data we are feeding it. And that data is very limited and distorted by our own, limited and distorted perception and consciousness. We are basically chasing our own tails with everything we do unless we start humbly and willingly “dig deeper” into ourselves and learn about our inherent nature and also learn how we need to change and further develop ourselves. First of all, Human beings become truly conscious and truly self-aware beings.

What we will become able to do after that, we do not know yet.