Early work in artificial intelligence pushed the thinking machine only so far. If something lacked common sense, as all programs up through today do, it ended up extremely brittle. It does a good job, but tell it about your rusted-out car, and it'll tell you what kind of meningitis your car is most likely to have. It doesn't know machines don't get diseases. These programs have the appearance of intelligence without actual understanding.
Common sense is the missing ingredient to getting programs to keep growing, the way humans do.
Learning occurs at the fringe of what you know already. If you don't know much, there's not much you can learn. All these programs can learn is the two or three things they were devised to learn. I think it's conscious now. If someone acts sane, I assume they are.