As soon as computers were relatively mainstream, people started to worry about their sentience. I think people look for consciousness everywhere the same way we look for faces everywhere; ie, our mind continually finds it even where it doesn't exist.
I rather think the opposite, that many people jump through elaborate intellectual hoops in order to deny the property of consciousness to things in their world that are different from themselves. Historically, that has meant animals and other human beings as well. Now we will be doing it to AI and for the same reason: we want slaves and we don't want to care about their suffering.
We look for consciousness and order in chaos in order to protect ourselves and participate in society, but we also ignore and deny consciousness when it's convenient
