The most important thing for all humans to understand about artificial intelligence is that it is not intelligent. It is a series of instructions, created by humans, that causes a certain reaction. A computer can never become "alive" any more than a cake recipe could suddenly turn into a cake. Just because you make the cookbook bigger and bigger (more "memory"), and make the recipe more and more complicated, there will never be a time when the cookbook is so detailed and sophisticated that it "emerges " into something completely new. The same is true for computers. The danger here to us is that some manipulative people might someday claim AI consciousness has emerged out of the complex programs and the large processing power we have added to it, and they could convince people that the AI knows what's best for them, and people may believe it. When in fact the AI will be saying what they want it to say. That's scary.