I don't agree we necessarily will be unable to reproduce it without being able to define consciousness, though, but I suspect we would agree that we won't be able to know if we have reproduced it or just created something very good at acting as if it's conscious (and we don't know whether or not the two are equivalent).

The sooner we realize that consciousness is a slippery socially concept and not a rationally definable property, the sooner we'll be able to move on from endless debates on the minutia of consciousness that act as a bottomless sink of intellectual energy. Devices like LaMDA, and DALLE-2 act as a Rorschach of Consciousness. That is to say they tell us more about the people people interacting with them than the devices themselves.

We already have such social machinery operating in the form of sex, gender, race, class, ability, &c. They each can take the form of acting as a frame[1] in which a strip of events can be interpreted with respect to. Even so, each has a different means in who acts an authority in the conferred frame/applied status and there is disagreement in descriptive and normative aspects of each. But I'd ask this, this that genuinely a problem?

I'm not being rhetorical when I ask, functionally what's the issue? Besides invoking a visceral intellectual response, what are the second-order effects of having a plurality of consciousness framing processes? And are they necessarily bad?

1. In the Goffmanian sense.

The primary effect I would expect is that none of them will adequately frame the layperson's expectation of "consciousness" and will thus likely be dismissed as meaningless hype.

There's nothing stopping us from reproducing consciousness before we fully understand it. Evolution created consciousness via random search; I don't think you can argue that evolution "understands" the consciousness it created

Except for the fact that this "belief" that has never been achieved. This is the core tenant of the AI religion.

Can you show me one problem that a computer has ever solved without detailed understanding by someone at some level and very specific instructions and a clear logical definition of the objective?

What is commonly called AI is no exception. It's mostly statistical search and pattern matching that only occurs through specific instructions by someone who understands in detail how the search should be organized and conducted.

In order for a computer to search for "consciousness", it must be explicitedly defined in terms of binary logic because this is all a "computer" understands. Any results are logically bound to this definition. If your definition is lacking, the search results will be likewise.