I don’t see the problem. There are many ways that it could be useful, particularly with editing files.

It’s an interesting conflation but I don’t really see them as the same.

We can measure brain activity and see what responses there are to what stimuli. Similarly we can query a neural network for the same.

I would say a dog is conscious. I would say a tree or a coral is probably not conscious, so to speak. Depending on your view of life, it could be possible to say they all have a soul, or none of them have a soul because only humans do.

We can probably make a computer that is conscious, and it is probably not that far away. There isn’t really anything that is truly special about human consciousness, in my view.

From a purely mechanical point of view, if you believe in souls, there is some threshold that must be overcome. If you simulate a human brain 1:1, does it have a soul? If you grow a human brain without a body, does it have a soul?

I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a soul being referred to as the thing that grants consciousness. If anything, that is a much lower bar for AI to achieve than the functionally impossible-to-achieve “immaterial and immortal part of the body that will live on in heaven, gifted to you by god”.