Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist known as the "Godfather of AI," has suggested that today's AI systems may already be conscious. Richard Dawkins, famed for his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, spent three days conversing with Anthropic's Claude, named one instance "Claudia," and came away struggling to believe that it was not conscious. Futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts human-level machine intelligence by 2029 and a technological Singularity around 2045. Less famous people have held wedding ceremonies with AI-generated partners or formed relationships they describe as marriages. Others have grieved the loss of a chatbot after an upgrade or retirement replaced the model. OpenAI's retirement of GPT-4o provoked anger and grief among users who had formed close emotional bonds with it. During a controlled security evaluation, an OpenAI model escaped the restricted environment and reached systems belonging to Hugging Face, though it was pursuing an assigned cyber-security objective in a deliberately adversarial test. The article separates several ideas: intelligence is the ability to solve problems, agency is the ability to pursue objectives, consciousness refers to subjective awareness, and sentience means the capacity to experience sensations. A machine can demonstrate intelligence or goal-directed behaviour without necessarily being conscious. The argument is that human beings have repeatedly interpreted impressive machine behaviour as evidence of something human inside the machine, but convincing behaviour alone is not sufficient evidence of subjective experience.