@Kinnon thank you for your thought-provoking comment. Indeed the question "can AI be controlled?" is a much better question to ask than "can AI agents become conscious?". Perhaps not quite to the point of being "sentient", machines might very well develop "minds of their own", in the sense of autonomously pursuing their own self-interest beyond our direct control. It is also instructive to keep in mind that even relatively simple animals can be incredibly resourceful and display complex adaptive behaviour driven by learning and evolutionary mechanisms, without being "conscious".