All this talk of P-zombies. Is there even a hint of a mechanism that anybody can think of to detect if something else is conscious, or to measure their degree of consciousness assuming it admits of degree?

I have spent my life figuring other humans are probably conscious purely on an Occam's razor kind of argument that I am conscious and the most straightforward explanation for my similarities and grouping with all these other people is that they are in relevant respects just like me. But I have always thought that increasingly complex simulations of humans could be both "obviously" not conscious but be mistaken by others as conscious. Does every human on the planet who reaches "voice mail jail," voice text interactive systems, are they all aware that they have not reached a consciousness? Do even those of us who are aware forget sometimes when we are not being careful? Is this going to become even a harder distinction to make as tech continues to get better?

I have been enjoying the television show "almost human." In this show there are androids, most of which have been designed to NOT be too much like humans, although what they are really like is boring rule-following humans. It is clear in this show that the value on an android "life" is a tiny fraction of the value on a "human" life, in the first episode a human cop kills his android partner in order to get another one. The partner he does get is much more like a human, but still considered the property of the police department for which he works, and nobody really has much of a problem with this. Ironically, this "almost human" android partner is African American.