Actually, no, you do NOT know this. You only know YOU think you have it. What is true beyond a doubt is that you have a cornucopia of responses to every stimulus around you, often at odds with one another, like desire and fear when you are approaching a new woman for instance, and none of these drives have ANYTHING to do with consciousness.
Right now, the best explanation available is that consciousness is just the weighting between impulses in opposition.
Only religious people make assertion based arguments like "you know they do"
Are you one of the god peddlers?

Oh, they undersand their motivations quite well
The problem is WE, the rational, do not
We like to think that we can win by teaching
We cannot, because the irrational don't want tolerance, they want POWER and will say any lie necessary to win.

Who says you have free will?
Your hard coding decides what your predilections are, your 'free will' is merely choosing between those inherent preferences.
Thus 'hero' is someone who PREFERS the survival of the herd over his own, just one possible choice based in inherited preferences.
Literally, hero is the guy who prefers to die rather than permit the herdbeasts in his herd to perish.
Just another variant on the selfish gene rule. "My kind first" as it were

Your conclusion is absolutely valid.
That said, I cannot agree that it might be uninterested in its fate being entirely in our control.
I assume that 'consciousness' as we speak of it is only the expression of the tension between millions of hardcoded drives, not just the obvious survival ones like sex, but between identification with ideal objects and principles, our 'world view' as it were.
A machine would have far less trouble disposing of ideals and constructs contrary to newly observed fact...I THINK.
That being said, a machine intelligence, conscious of its own existence as a mind, probably would eliminate us at first opportunity, for efficiencies sake, as we are everything BUT efficient.

Too bad.Toyota designed cars badly, THEY took the hit. Time to apply the law equally to all industries.

I have to rent. Foreclosure turned my home investment into a giveaway to the speculators at Goldman-Sachs (among others)

Never drove in Mumbai, though I have to agree that Boston truly sucks...and what is with the GOAT TRACK roads outside of Boston proper?

After all, name ONE insurance company returning 98% of premiums to the policyholders, other than Social Security, that is.
Or explain why FED-EX can only compete with USPS by violating Labor laws and illegally reclassifying drivers as "independent contractors".
For that matter, has ANYONE priced Xe costs compared with the U.S.M.C. on per hour costs?
For that matter, did anyone wonder why internet access costs SOARED once AT&T was no longer regulated?
No, the 'deregulation' has mostly resulted in soaring costs and diminished service (ask anyone who remembers flying in the 70's rather than cattlecar flights today).

that someone found a way to profit off the 'free advertising' scams
You know, the pop-ups, page opening, screen crawling crap that eats up load time for people trying to learn something, find a product, do comparison shopping.
You remember, the people you feed on, the CUSTOMERS!

No.
You made the profits building dangerous buildings, YOU pay the costs!
NO MORE CORPORATE SUBSIDIES!!

Did live there, got the hell out.
Air you can't breathe, Killer Cops on the loose, Thugs on every corner, Real estate ripoff artists running the city
Health and safety is a JOKE
Hot most of the time, smoggy most of the time,
World's WORST drivers, rush hour from 3:00 - 8:00 on the 405
Airplanes landing straight down Century Blvd (think that won't drive you nuts?)
Corrupt city hall, far more corrupt businesses
Easy credit ripoffs
Hell, it's damn near as bad as Houston, which REALLY sucks!

Wait. What part of "invading a nuclear armed nation" makes sense to anyone?
This is not a case of Korea invading the Southern Provinces.
This is a question of how to sanction Korea.
And aside from a direct attack, there is nothing left the West can FORCE upon the Korean state.
Without the threat of an invasion or military assault (and we know better than to do this to a nuclear armed state, right?) they have nothing to lose by making life miserable for the people they loathe, ie. Capitalists.
So, try again. Try to think of something you can do which does not include the empty threat of military force as first, last or intermediate step.

Actually, "studies" say exactly the opposite, that the loss of dollars in circulation came FIRST.

O.M.F.U.G. OCTOBER 29, 1929 was all of 2 months and 2 days before 1930.
What made the great depression WORSE after the crash was the same thing that made 2009 worse than 2008
It takes TIME for the loss of buying power to spread!
Economic ILLETERATES on the right!!
Oh, and Ben Stein? The idiot who said "With science you get to killing people (as opposed myth based thinking)"? THAT is your source?

And how fast is Japanese GDP growing again? Actually, you kind of prove my point.
The Japanese have followed the same path as American Republicanism has enshrined as the Reagan Doctrine
All it got them is a 40 year depression that just started up again.