Inconnu

Without god and souls, just the mechanistic "grey matter" computer in our heads, it should be possible to create a truly artificial thinking conscious "being". Science fiction etc has covered a lot of moral ground regarding the ethics of this topic from the perspective of the "created" and it is truly fascinating, but what would it mean for us? If we are made aware of our own 'disposable' nature by way of being able to produce in a factory the one thing we prize above all else and that which set us apart from a pebble, consciousness, will respect for humanity diminish and be relagated to be on a par with respect for your microwave? Bearing in mind that the respect has always been lacking to some extent anyway, possibly because of the ease in which we can create humans already, could this be the proverbial straw breaking the back? What would happen to human society, the way we see and feel about other human beings?
Could the inability of our creation of true sentience be interpreted as proof of spiritualty as currently defined, with gods and souls etc

I hope this has not already been done to death, apologies if that is so.

excreationist

Well it takes a lot of time and resources for a human to learn what they need to to achieve adult-level intelligence...
I think human-level AI's would also learn in a similar way that humans do - at least initially - then their artificial brains could be cloned... but it still takes a lot of time and resources to make *unique* intelligences/personalities. Well I guess cloned AI's could be used to raise and teach new, unique AI's fairly cheaply... and the raising/education might be able to happen within a computer simulation and then the unique personality gets put into a physical robot...
They'd still be fairly expensive though... anyway, I think they would be motivated by seeking pleasures and avoiding pains... (though not necessarily as extreme as ours)... many people would probably empathisize with them - especially if the AI's look human and talk lucidly about their worries. The types of people who want value their wellbeing would be similar to the types who think it isn't ethical for animals to suffer.
Maybe we'd have less respect for humans but the laws about destroying humans and microwaves would probably be different so our behaviour would partly depend on the laws.

We don't even have computers as powerful as the human brain yet... (or maybe there are one or two of them in the world) and even that isn't enough... it also matters how those computers are used. I think training neural networks is the right way to go. At the moment the biggest artificial neural networks probably have less than a million neurons. But our brains have about 100 BILLION neurons, each connected to about 10,000 others. And it then takes us many years to learn to talk, etc. Even with a huge artificial neural network you'd have to set it up properly so that it works properly. (In humans we sometimes have birth defects that stop people from being very intelligent - even though they'd have a lot of neurons)
It is too early to tell if artificial consciousness is impossible.... though some spiritual people might like to think that true AI will never happen.