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I am once again baffled by folks in the tech industry being totally unaware of what came before them.

You are, in a way, asking what consciousness is and how one could recognize it. This has been a philosophical topic for millennia; this is a reasonable place to start reading: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/

It is a very interesting and deep topic. But let’s not pretend that recent advances in AI are the thing that brought it up for the first time.