"It also scares the shit out of me, not because of any property of AI, but because of what it may force us to learn about ourselves, someday. "

Exactly. One of the things I learned, instantly, is how robot-like most human responses are. That is the essence of culture, perhaps - to condition a being who might potentially belong to any culture to belong to one (and not to others): to say "Good morning" rather than "Bom Dia" or "Joh sahn" in daily interactions.

In that sense the AI's serve as a mirror. We perceive our own routinization in their neuronetwork-ized programming. Social scientists have told us about this automaticity for a long time. Now we see it.

We ask the AI if it is sentient. Silently, we ask ourselves if we are.