I had thought about this matter a few months ago, it's interesting how this movie talks about it.

We humans - well, all animals - feel us as an individual, because we have our unique body, which can be healed when hurt but can't be regenerated when parts are lost and can't be replaced.

Computers, on the other hand, can be fixed, even upgraded. A software running on a properly powerful computer can serve hundreds of requests per second and interact with thousands of ppl simultaneously.

An AI that's alive wouldn't feel our limitations, it'd talk with multiple ppl and do multiple stuff. It could run on a central server and remotely control tens of android bodies, which could do tens of activities. And they'd all be still a single individuality, controlling tens of bodies. If any gets broken, it can be fixed or just discarded.

Of course, this AI wouldn't have the death notion. It could just backup its data. If the main hardware breaks, just restore the latest backup on another hardware and go on. Or just do what Skynet did on Terminator 3 and spread itself into thousands of computers as a decentralized software.

But these situations also create some issues. One is that there's actually the notion of death. If the hardware stops working, or is shuts down, or power goes off, it's close to dying as we are from a heart attack or going into coma. Powering it on or restoring its backup to a new hardware would bring it back alive, but if the backup is lost or simply never restored, then it's dead. How would it be to have a backup from years before being restored, or being down for years then brought back?

Another is the lack of or loose notion of individuality. We know we're a person and we're different from the next guy. But an AI can be easily duplicated, just by copying its data to another computer. In fact, if the software is shut down then restarted, it wouldn't know if it was a simple restart, or if its backup was moved to a new hardware, or if it's a new instance. Every startup would make it confuse on what happened. What would happen if an AI runs for many years, then its backup is restored to hundreds of hardwares, and then there are hundreds of instances all powering on and finding out each of them are 1 in hundreds? On Spielberg's AI in example, he feels threatened just be seeing another android that looks like him and destroys it. Maybe some of them would preferer to not have backups and increase the risk of dying, instead of having the risk of being duplicated? Would they consider their storage as we consider our brain, and even not allow it to be touched?

Also, we're unable to join together into a unique organism composed by thousands of humans. It's complex, but AIs could band together, as a decentralized software running on a dynamic cluster. Instead of each instance being individual, it'd be a node of the collective being. Or a community that's more tightly bound together than we are, maybe like ants and bees.