I can easily envision that future. Anyway, any real world process is, in the end, computable by a FSM, even a self-conscious entity can't escape that assumption (if physicalism is "correct").
A bunch of lookup tables and some flip-flops, apparently, can do wonders.
Given sufficient future progress in AI [-], I can see two dangerous outcomes since one could conflate inanimate matter and life into the same computational basket: the nihilistic one, when our own sentience will be downgraded to triviality and only our codified laws will keep the human spirit philosophically afloat (but for how long?) and the specular outcome, a sort of machine-hugging movement :)
In a sense, or every life form is trivial and meaningless (including us) or everything is special and "sacred".
[-] For instance, if every test we throw at a language model strongly hints at "sentience"
Given sufficient future progress in AI [-], I can see two dangerous outcomes since one could conflate inanimate matter and life into the same computational basket: the nihilistic one, when our own sentience will be downgraded to triviality and only our codified laws will keep the human spirit philosophically afloat (but for how long?) and the specular outcome, a sort of machine-hugging movement :)
In a sense, or every life form is trivial and meaningless (including us) or everything is special and "sacred".
[-] For instance, if every test we throw at a language model strongly hints at "sentience"