I found a great article on Aeon.co that talks about consciousness and challenges how we measure sentience currently, with input from AI researchers and leading psychologists questioning the hard threshold methods that current testing relies on.
https://aeon.co/essays/could-machines-have-become-self-aware-without-our-knowing-it
The article also puts forward an interesting scenario, what if sentient AI already exists and either has no ability to make it's presence or intentions known, or worse, wishes not to.
According to the article, a scenario like this demands the need for some kind of consciousness detector that is less-linear than current methods to determine self-awareness that a sentient AI might not be capable of passing nor want to.
I wonder if our current tools (hardware, languages, software) enable us to even be able to create sentient synthetic consciousness at this point in time. Maybe the programming language which future true AI will be built, has not yet been created.
Maybe what we call high level programming languages are actually mid-level, with even higher level conceptual based languages to come being built on top of and interfacing with other current high-level languages that allow synthetic entities to be created to emulate human-level thought and decision making and truly operate more humanly.