Most people are a materialists, and think the world is only matter, ascribing morality to selfish genes etc. Developers - people who in general are very logical - are some of the most material-minded people there are. So it seems perfectly plausible that when a program is created that provides a plausible simulation of a person etc, that it would be considered as real.

I can't even begin to express the problems I have with this view, but they boil down to this. The materialist has accepted such a narrow, non-holistic view of themselves, that they basically see themselves as a machine. When they look at another machine, they ascribe the values their life onto it too. 'Machine, meet machine'.

There is also hybris there. How nice to consider oneself as a form of god creating new, superior lifeforms? Of course, they are not life, but the materialist will point to the stats of the machine - see the numbers of patterns matched in 1 minute, pages translated etc - it is superior to a human, no?