I think a lot of people end up mixing being alive with being conscious. Is a tree conscious? Is a self driving car conscious?
If we use the definition "Aware of its surroundings, responding and acting towards a certain goal" then a lot of things fit that definition.
When an AI plays the atari games, learns from it and plays at a human level, I would call it conscious. It's not a human level conscious agent but conscious nonetheless.
Consciousness has a specific meaning - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia
The analogy between deep neural networks and the brain has proven to be very fruitful. Other analogies may as well. See our upcoming paper for more info.
https://grey.colorado.edu/mediawiki/sites/mingus/images/3/3a...