What we are is more than what we do

We are witnessing a surge in artificial systems, from autonomous robots to self-driving cars, all of which already display features of autonomy, agency, and goal-directed behavior. With the advent of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) it is plausible that such artificial autonomous agents (AAA) will display behaviors similar to human autonomous agents consciously pursuing their own goals. The more those agents develop complex and human-like capacities, the more the impetus towards granting them consciousness and associated mental capacities (such as intrinsic motivations and intentions) analogous to humans will grow (Dehaene et al., 2017). In the pervasive functionalist Zeitgeist this is a forgone conclusion; it is only a matter of how rapidly AAA will develop and how sophisticated they will be. Because, once they show the same traits we do, what possibly could be missing?