As for artificial consciousness, news is always stating it's just around the corner. Well, that corner must be incredibly big to get around, because it's still not here yet. I agree that we probably won't see it, even the kind presented by Arthur C. Clarke's HAL-9000.
The movie (and later series) Ghost in the Shell has some semblance of AI in it, yet it's presented as somewhat childlike in its personality (used in weaponized robots called Tachikomas.) The movie develops the concept of AI further, and does question consciousness as well as our place in it. The director, Masamune Shirow, said it's an homage to Arthur Koestler's The Ghost in the Machine as well as the inspiration for the movie.
Recently, I also watched "Transcendence" but wasn't as thrilled by it as the commercials had led me to believe. If you haven't seen it, it's worth seeing once, in my opinion. It's well-acted and so forth, but it left me questioning the motives of the antagonists more than anything. Especially as none of them (or anyone else for that matter) ever pointed out that had they not taken the action they had, Depp's character never would have taken his AI that big step further.
It had promise, but wasn't realized in a believable way. HAL is still believable, both as a projection of the technology, and the questions about self-awareness and his positive interactions with humanity (at least until the end 
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