The whole pre-occupation with consciousness when people talk about AI seems confusing to me. It feels like people talk about whether AI is conscious like it’s an important or meaningful quality to have without ever explaining why consciousness is important in the first place.
My personal guess is that consciousness is a psychological quirk of how our minds evolved. I don’t see anything particularly necessary about it. Perhaps a conscious intelligence is useful in some contexts, but it seems possible to have non-conscious intelligence that are just as, or more, powerful than their conscious counterparts.