Sorry, I'll be blunt: Are you sure you are not projecting?

My perspective comes from a set of pillars. First, I work at an HPC center, where we support running and development of AI systems, incl. international projects. IOW, I have knowledge about how these systems built, work and needs to continue working.

Moreover, I'm an HPC programmer myself, so I'm not completely uninformed about the math this involving this thing, and I'm lucky enough to have friends who are much more dedicated than me, and we discuss how this thing works and feels like this way.

I'm not an AI hater per se, being programmed AI systems in the past, incl. emergent intelligence systems with multi-agents which can span continents if need be (this was my master's thesis, time flies).

However, knowing what these things are capable of and how they are built. I don't believe them they're conscious/sentient beings. I also had much more time to ponder on these things even before LLMs being a thing. Some hard sci-fi books have asked these questions seriously in their captive adventures way earlier. If one reads these books seriously, there are a lot of philosophical angles to consider and draw upon.

I can discuss in good faith. For hours, days or months even, but throwing "you're a narrow-minded dogmatic luddite neanderthal!" card to anyone disagreeing with you is not it.