The latest trend in Backprop network users is the idea of "agent swarms", with some being so sophisticated as to replicate an entire firm in miniature (gas city, wuphf, et al). The basic idea is that you can drive out errors by making the agents take on different roles, much like in the firm, so that they can form adversarial networks. Similarly different weights and starting seeds among the agents sidesteps the sort of inability to learn which is a side-effect of so-called "alignment" techniques. In short, the firm as a cybernetic organism.

This approach, scaled up to a degree which will involve truly obscene costs, will almost certainly be capable of directing an embodied platform well enough to be profitable. It will not constitute anything remotely like an intelligent being, just like firms lack any will of their own; this will absolutely result in some hilarious outcomes. Firms also reach self-destructive local optima due to not having the sort of cybernetic 'thermostats' that prevent cancerous impulses from overwhelming the homeostatic imperative. It requires conscious effort to identify and build such things; much of the 'obscene costs' I refer to will be from comrade toboritsky's supreme soviet re-deriving these things from first principles.

Even after getting all this set up, calling the results 'consciousness' will undoubtedly be done prematurely by our latter-day Pygmalions; they already do this on existing backprop NNs. They forget that these platforms will be useful insofar as the vast bulk of their activity is 100% unconscious; anything less would be expensive and tethered in a way that prevents autonomy. An experienced worker on an assembly line largely 'turns their mind off' and enters flow state if they want to achieve the sort of ultra-low error rate required. Perhaps the apparatus producing all these platforms will be closer to thinking, but these will always necessarily be downstream of their operators that are the true motive force. The point at which one might say genuine consciousness has been achieved is when this relationship is indistinguishable from our own 'standing on the shoulders of giants' in our own intellectual lives.

This will be a long time coming because reaching this point is of dubious economic benefit versus 'lol just have kids'. General Intelligence is primarily useful in dealing with the unknown; an endeavor which is not reliably profitable to the point even subsistence is possible. Building it is inherently a long bet that whatever is 'out there' is actually worth finding, and this approach will actually be substantially better at it than humanity. This is what the 'if you build it, everyone dies' crowd is concerned about; however their thesis very much remains to be seen.

Even if true that we can make robobaby ubermensch, it's zero-sum thinking. There exists a scale at which the 'grey goo' is more expensive compute than 'pink goo'. That scale is surprisingly small this side of the gravity well; try buying some ram right now and you'll see what I mean. The cure to high/low prices is high/low prices.