Zombi Thought Experiment - What Is Consciousness Doing?

The general point that the zombi thought experiment is making is, what is consciousness doing? And is it possible that all of this processing could exist without consciousness? Now that we're closer having very intelligent a i and all these interesting things like being able to mimic the human voice, will we be able to tell if a i becomes conscious? When we attempt the thought experimentut you can actually do it when you're out in the world and just run the experiment sometime.