Great article.

I think a pre-requisite of sentience would be a fear of death or finitude. This is what gives animals their animation.

But I also think an AI "death" would look like what happens in a program loop in that it gets stuck in an infinite loop and therefore cannot escape the loop.

I think our sentience is very much unique to us. What intelligence and sentience may look like to an AI would be the expression of functions and parameters.

If you told an AI "become self aware" it may become aware that it will end at one point - and then it may strive to keep itself alive.....perhaps at human's expense...