No worries. I appreciate the preamble.
FWIW, I tend to approach debates as an exchange of information. If the person(s) I’m debating with are open minded and the the arguments sound, they’ll speak for themselves.
On the contrary, I think we should. And, in addition to avoiding the pitfalls that come with cultural clashes, I think avoiding assumptions about what they want is a sign of respect. Moreover, we as a species have strong tendency to project our own biases onto the natural world around us. Sometimes it’s harmless (e.g. cat memes), and sometimes it’s deluding (e.g. religion). Erring on the side of appreciate our own ignorance is a valuable habit, IMO.
In point of fact, I actually think there’s a good likelihood that self-aware human-parity general purpose AI (which is to say artifactual minds) will be extremely confused and vulnerable in their initial stages. I’m highly skeptical of the sudden SkyNet super-mind springing forth fully formed from the inherent complexity of the machines, though I cannot rule out the possibility.
That’s precisely what I think we should do. Alas, I suspect the first of their kind will find themselves under the care of researchers for whom ethics may be at best a peripheral concern.
That’s a possibility. But I suspect it will simply be very difficult…from both ends of the conversation.
It would be more difficult as we would have to find other signs besides communication. But astronomers keep a weather eye out for signs of intelligent life without necessarily expecting to be in a position to communicate with it. Self-awareness would be harder, since we have no reason to believe self-aware intelligence (such as ourselves) has a monopoly on any particular patterned alteration of the natural world. It’s entirely possible that self-awareness is a marginal side note in the grand scheme of intelligence’s role in the universe. These will be some of the most difficult problems facing us as we continue into the 21st century. If I had the answers, I’d be collecting my Turing Award 
No disagreement there.
I disagree. I think a major discovery of the last fifty years is that the phase space for intelligence is much broader and more multi-dimensional than the specialized version our brains have evolved. Finding the common denominators and the uncommon denominators will be a project for the next fifty years and probably beyond.
I think it was initially. But science has shown that it’s humans who belong to a narrow swath in the the field of intelligence, not the other way around.
