I'd expand a little bit to say inevitably emergent property. That is to say, if you create a sufficiently complex information-processing network, some level of consciousness will result. With regards to current AI, we're a fair way away from building something with enough connections, but we'll get there.

One thing that gives me pause about the inevitability hypothesis is that the type of connection, or manner of information processing, may matter: there might be something about neurons that isn't (currently) reproducible in silicon. I don't know, and there's not (yet) any evidence for or against, but it at least seems like plausible speculation. We just don't know enough about any of this right now.