[walod]

It depends on what you mean by self-consciousness. On the one hand it can be processes for understanding oneself and modifying oneself to better survive in the environment, on the other you have the illusory "qualia" / subjective experience. It seems possible to me to have a self-improving process and an active process to evaluate the world state and self state without consciousness, and that this could result in something life-like. In this sense, is AI far away? It doesn't have to be necessarily.

It doesn't make sense to me personally why we need subjective experience, nor what it is in a physical sense. We can have agency and variability of choice without it, but at the same time we know how powerful it is in humans. Until we know exactly how it functions, i don't think anyone can claim with any certainty if it will happen, or how far away it is.