You're an excellent writer and thinker!

My thoughts:

I agree with you that Ava isn't conscious, however I will provide a devil's advocate argument and then solve it.

Devils advocate:

There are humans who display this same lack of empathy and kill people.

However, I find that they lack a component of consciousness (if it is indeed possible for them to have absolutely no empathy, serial killers for example are usually reenacting traumas that they can't get over, so something more is going on for them).

Someone that truly lacked empathy in my opinion is lacking a component of consciousness, the ability to feel others emotions.

I'll take it back around though and also say there are probably levels of consciousness and who is to say humans ourselves aren't spread across them.