[wruza]

They may have some kind of metaphyiscal awareness, or not

Another option is there is some kind of metaphyiscal awareness everywhere, and it's only coincidental that objects of class "human" eventually convince themselves into believing that it's equivalent or highly related to their own thinking process. Unless we exclude this option somehow, AI can't be definitely seen as simply rolex, because it does that too.

Currently AI is discontinuous and passive, but is that even required?

without a comprehensive theory of consciousness it's parsimonious to assume they're not aware

This hypothesis creates more entities (one island of awareness per complex enough object), so why not the other way round?