So you don't believe there is any distinction between being "alive" and running software? Providing of course the software is complex enough to display human traits such as thought, emotions, creativity and so forth?

Just to be clear, I hold no solid viewpoint on this, I'm just interested as to what other folk here think.

"alive", life has deferent meaning (and defined requirements e.g self-reproduction) than "consciousness", "sentience" or "mind".

Unless you belief in a mystical soul component (I do not), there is nothing else "there" but machine. A very complex, biological machine. But there is no reason to believe that that a sufficiently powerful software/hardware can not replicate the functionality of that machine exactly. Then what possible difference could there be between the two duplicate machines?

But, we will have systems that exhibit a many aspects of "thought" and sentience long before we are able to code up homo sapien sapien.

I'm not sure it's just about computational power. Currently we mainly deal with digital computers that process information in a very discrete way. This is a nice article with regards to the human brain being analogue or digital-

https://www.quora.com/Is-the-human-brain-analog-or-digital

The development of quantum computers could offer a huge leap forward with the development of AI.

I think making that distinction would be similar to saying that a computer is not running software because it was built inside minecraft.

Although, it's possible that creating something that does what humans do requires the same materials humans are made of (but seems unlikely, or at least I think other materials will allow a close approximation).

"Alive" doesn't require human traits. Bacteria and plants are alive.

I'm with you though: consciousness and sense of "self" are just matters of complexity of the brain.

As soon as software can convince the majority of humanity that it's conscious, the question will be academic.