No, "AI" will never become conscious

In the late 20th century, there was a gorilla named Koko who made waves by displaying an apparent ability to talk to humans in sign language. This would've had shocking implications for life as we know it, but the science determined that what she was doing wasn't actually "using language". Through reinforcement learning, she had come to realize that mimicking the hand signals of her human handlers would result in certain outcomes. She knew that making the hand signal for "food" might convince the humans to give her food, but she didn't have the brain structures that would allow her to understand that the hand sign represented food in an abstract way. She could learn word associations, but she couldn't understand the grammar and syntax required for the communication to actually be a "language". We did not discover Gorilla sapiens. That's not to say it's impossible; whatever mutation made human brains develop language could happen again, and if it does, we should take it seriously. I…