Selfhood, Artificial Intelligence, and Robotic People

Is AI finally achieving selfhood? You'll find lots of opinions about this, many of them based on loose, if-it-walks-like-a-duck parallels. Here's my opinion based on 25 years research attempting to explain what selves are and how they emerged within nothing but physical chemistry. The big difference between selves and non-selves is that we exist by persistence. We're fragile, yet we've somehow managed to survive for an uninterrupted 3.8 billion-year run.