I’m not sure that I would characterize this as a ‘lack of consciousness’. Of all the times that I have experienced this, it’s because I was thinking deeply about something else (not lacking consciousness), and simply assigned a subroutine to the driving.
Actually, I am not trying to prove anything to you (or others) or say how people should think about consciousness. I am just sharing my experiences and what I have found based on them, so others can try out and see for themselves, so perhaps we could learn together more about these.
Neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinas did an interesting experiment on himself, and explained it in an interview on Science Network about his book "I of the vortex". He was able to consistently turn his foot inwards by placing a strong magnet at certain position on his head. Then he decided he would decide to move his foot outwards when the magnet was applied on the same spot. When he did this, his foot still moved inwards. His experience was that "I changed my mind". He was able to repeat this experiment many times, and each time he felt he had changed his mind. So he could not distinguish between changing his mind and his body doing something and his mind making up post-hoc reason for it.
This story, as well as my experience of trying to understand my consciousness experimentally has led me to become very suspicious about my own thoughts about my conscious experiences.
And consequentially, about other people's thoughts about their conscious experiences as well. So my question to you is, how would you know that of all the times you have had a similar experience this, you were all the time fully focused in deeply thinking about something?
Author's warning seems to be:
1. "Conscious" means you can feel things (have feelings)
2. "Conscious" means you can have intentions
3. --> A conscious AI could be hurt, take umbrage, and take measures to either protect itself or take revenge.
Kids tear wings off insects; I can certainly imagine people inflicting pain on a machine on the principle that it's "just" a machine. Like, you're angry, you want to hurt someone (or kick the cat), but you refrain, because you're a decent person and don't do that kind of thing. Hurting a conscious, intelligent machine could have bad consequences.
I don't happen to believe that consciousness is some kind of extended intelligence, so I don't believe that AI research is ever going to result in machine consciousness. I certainly don't know what consciousness is; but provisionally, I take the view that it's fundamental - that everything else depends on consciousness, not the other way round.
That said I'm not sure that being actively conscious should really be a goal. Does it make us happier? More effective? For a lot of things I find myself trying to avoid becoming self-conscious because it interferes with my ability to do the thing I'm trying to do.
Analytical mind is actually not very good at micro-managing the body. You can test this by trying to do something very simple, such as lifting a spoon, but this time doing it with your analytical mind.
What you describe appears to me that in your experience your analytical mind is your consciousness, and by "avoiding becoming self-conscious" you mean you want to let your body (or some other part of you, depending on what you do) do it's thing without micro-management from the analytical mind.
If you want to learn more about this, "Inner game of tennis" expains how olympic-level athletes (in this case tennis players) need to learn to let go of the control by the analytical mind when they practice. When this happens, the end result is an experience of flow. For me, being in flow state feels very good, and I can do things that would not be possible otherwise (for example in dancing). It is something I aim to experience more in my life.
Does this make us happy? Efficient? I would say so, but I would say that setting up an aim to become happy or efficient might not give you as good results as setting up an aim to experience more flow in your life.
Our experience, however, is that consciousness is a constant. The ancient mystics, monks and people studying meditation and other similar practices have made some practical observations. These indicate that such lack of consciousness is actually quite common, we are just not very aware of it. It is also possible to experimentally understand this, although it is probably not possible to prove it scientifically.
In other words, we do not possess meta-consciousness, consciousness about our consciousness. We just fill in the blanks, believe that we have been conscious. To become conscious more often and more deeply, you need to be able to control your attention and not lose it. The modern society does not help you in learning to control your attention, more to the contrary. So we are probably even less conscious than common people at the time that the ancient mystics lived.
We should be less concerned about the consciousness of the AI, and more concerned about increasing our own consciousness.