[dificilis]

"Conscious" is a word that has no objective scientific definition.

It follows that "slightly conscious" is not well defined.

In practice "conscious" just means "anything that thinks and makes decisions like I do".

Also, nobody actually understands how their own brain works when they are thinking and deciding, which makes it very difficult for anyone to determine if some particular AI software thinks and decides the same way that their brain does those things.

[xvilka]

Precisely! We cannot understand what consciousness is until we gain complete understanding of the human brain. Until that, we will have no AGI. Given the sheer complexity of the task, unlikely it will happen in this century.

[nnx]

Don't think we can assume complete understanding of the human brain is a strict dependency.

The first AGI might look and function nothing like a biological brain, perhaps not even inspired from biological brains, or very loosely.

Like airplanes do not look and function like birds.