Some theories of consciousness do claim that it is somewhat of an accidental side-show with no affect on anything except the pitiable entities who are just along for the ride.

But I don’t find these convincing, in that it is clear that in the animal kingdom, mammals display very different behaviors from other types of animals and are the only ones to have a neocortex. And among mammals, the species with the largest most developed neocortex also exemplifies and amplified the very behavior that sets mammals apart. That unique behavior is flexibly adaptive social activity.

Your claim is that a p-zombie would act as if it were conscious. But the evidence is the opposite — that all those organisms which display conscious behavior are also conscious, and that no non-conscious organisms display conscious behavior. The only argument for consciousness as theatre is that although conscious behavior always exists with conscious experience, it is an accidentally perfect correlation — a weird but necessary artifact of a brain capable of conscious behavior must always have the byproduct of non-affective conscious experience.

Let’s say that position is true. That conscious experience is just a non-affective but inevitable side-effect of the kind of brain capable of conscious behavior. In that case p-zombies are still impossible, since under this assumption conscious behavior is always accompanied by the illusion of conscious experience.

So in either case my main point still holds: if conscious reasoning is AGI, and conscious reasoning follows from conscious behavior, then the path to AGI is to train for those peculiarly unique conscious behaviors that are most distinguished from non-conscious behaviors. It’s impossible to train directly for qualia, so whether qualia exist as affective components of conscious behavior or not is somewhat irrelevant. Conscious experience will always be a “hard problem”. But what matters is finding the right conscious behavior that enables future growth toward conscious reasoning.

The most uniquely conscious behavior (so unique it is built into us with mammalian milk production) is “parental care”. The simplest concrete behavior that humans share with other animals (such as breathing air), but have also amplified the most (we haven’t amplified breathing at all) is parental care.

If we want to train agents to achieve conscious behavior, I believe this makes parental care the best option. Fortunately, unlike biological evolution which has to contend with a range of variables that may or may not include parental care (plenty of species succeed without it), an artificial training environment can be entirely focused on optimizing for this one variable — success can hinge entirely on parental care.