> Fear not. Even if the thing achieves consciousness, writes poetry, falls in love, critiques literature, etc., people will still claim that it's just faking it. "Neat trick, but it still doesn't have a soul, so it can't be conscious!"

Good point. Academics seem to have accepted that consciousness isn't magic for a while now, so building an artificial brain might not be so convincing for the rest of the world.

> Personally, the chaos I'm really looking forward to is the legal mess that would arise...

Yeah. I wouldn't even know where to start with figuring out some of those questions. I'm sure someone has written about this already, so if anyone knows who and where this has been written about I'd be interested in reading about it.