Suppose we build an AGI that is designed to be completely honest, and it says that it experiences qualia. Would you believe it? Why/why not?

Capabilities are going up dramatically, and costs will go down as volume increases and technology improves.

The number of industrial robots installed grew 30% last year, with half a million units installed. At that rate of growth, it will take about 30-40 years before industrial robots outnumber humans. That's a long time, but not that long... many Redditors reading this will not yet be at retirement age by then. And it's certainly possible that the growth rate may increase faster than 30% annually as technology improves.

Have you read "The ship who sang" by Anne McAffrey? 1969 sci-fi. Great book. If you like the idea of being a spaceship then you should definitely read that book.

Yes, it's the prelude.

In deep learning, neurons are not represented as a linear function. The output of a neuron is implemented by taking a linear combination of the inputs and then feeding that into a non-linear function, e.g. ReLU. The non-linearity is critical, because without it, you can't approximate non-linear functions well, even with deep networks.