alt Hacker NewsI agree, in the same way that bodies are not a "them".
A program with agency, opinion and intent however, does qualify. To say that such programs are "thems" only if they run on specific hardware, say a homo sapiens, is very tricky territory. Slavery and Fascism both leaned heavily on the axiom that the hardware needs a specific skin color.
I am finding it depressingly rare to see people who don't believe, whether they admit it or not, in souls here. I used to think a technical audience like software engineers would have a decent percentage of people making the completely commonsense default assumption that consciousness like anything else we have seen till now is a physical phenomenon.