There's a lot wrong here, too much to respond to in a single post. I strongly encourage you to step outside your lay understanding of rights theory and dive into the complex literatures on animal, nature, and AI rights. For the moment, I will say that you seem to assume that MORAL rights for animals (as opposed to LEGAL rights, which operate quite differently) are predicated off of the single idea that consciousness leads to sentience leads to rights. This is a VERY oversimplified view that is shared by only some scholars. The reality is that the concepts of consciousness and sentience are still hotly debated, despite your assumption that they are settled attributes that establish moral consideration. I stand by my statement that you have an insufficient understanding of rights, since you mention neither interest theory nor will theory (the main competing schools of thought on rights). "Right of way" is absolutely a "right" in every sense of the word (from a Hohfeldian framework perspective), but it is a LEGAL right, not a MORAL one. Like many people, you are conflating the two. In short, in order to faithfully engage in a debate over AI rights, at a minimum, you need to understand legal v moral rights, interest theory v will theory, Hohfeldian incidents, and theories of moral/legal personhood. Until you have a strong grasp of these, debating the merits of machine rights with a computer scientist is a waste of my time and energy. If you read my book and have questions afterwards, I'd be happy to answer them. But I'm not going to litigate the arguments in my book over responses to a Medium post.