Here’s a podcast discussion between Kevin Scott, CTO Microsoft, and Adrian Tchaikovsky, a popular sci-fi writer (who currently publishes an 800 page book every year)
A few excerpts:
AT: “So, let’s say you had, for each of these robot-controlled Formula 1 cars, you added in one of these programs and gave it a particular personality. And this one was punchy, and this one was sort of trash talking its opponent. And this one was the, you know, the new program that had never ridden a race before and was very much the underdog. You – I mean, you could do a whole kind of WWF, or it would be – it would be WWF meets Cars, basically, wouldn’t it? You could have this, and people would get enormously invested in these completely artificial sort of fake personalities, because that’s what we do. … And so, I think – and, frankly, I would not be remotely surprised if within as short as five years, we were seeing things like that, whereby you had the clash – completely predetermined artificial clashes of things that were nonetheless personality filled and interesting enough to make a whole extra sport of their own.”
I like this excerpt because I just started doing this at work yesterday… a bit sooner than the 5-year estimate. 
They get into a discussion about consciousness and ethics:
"I mean, certainly with Children of Memory, the whole point of the book is really where do you draw the line on intelligence, if you have a complex enough system that is simulating intelligence? If you have enough platform that you’re running an intelligence program on, at what point do you have to concede that actually, this is effectively intelligence, even though it’s entirely artificially generated or entirely sort of arising organically out of these small complex interactions?
"And like I was saying before, there is definitely an argument that that is how our consciousness works. And it isn’t actually what we think it is. And that’s the deep dive the book is taking into these various different models of sentience.
Interesting to hear a conversation on this topic between these two.
