It's funny how all the grifters have moved on. Okay, the cars still can't drive themselves, but now surely AI is a year away from being conscious!
Susan Blackmore observed that you can implement all the known functionality of human consciousness by answering the question 'Are you conscious?' with 'yes'.
We don't have any broad agreement that it does anything else, and we know that we do lots of things unconsciously despite our commonplace beliefs to the contrary.
That is not the argument.
People may well be conscious (no matter what they've said). What is the function of consciousness? Intriguingly, upon some reflection, we know of nothing that could not be done without consciousness [1]. One can seek food, mate, avoid danger, and so on without consciousness. One can speak and be intelligent without consciousness. So, why did evolution endow us with consciousness? Big puzzle.
[1] And now for the footnote/joke (which illustrates the profound point made in the paragraph above): The only thing we know of that one cannot do without consciousness is this: to truthfully answer "yes" to the question "are you conscious?".
Living in the future is just such an odd comment to me. I get your enthusiastic about it, but what you consider futuristic is different than what I would consider.