Do you think being alive is necessarily, rather than merely historically, required for consciousness?

I don't buy into any strong claim about consciousness at the present time, because humanity doesn't seem to have any test that an outside observer can apply; this means that at the moment only a consciousness itself can know that it is conscious, while everyone else has to assume or not based on mere correspondences such as "alive" (which excludes computers) or "talks to me" (which recorded messages have done since the wax cylinder), leaving us to argue about if PETA are liberators or nuts well before "Attention Is All You Need" was a sparkle in Google's eye.