Probably possible, yes. Subconscious drives are a thing. You could have sentience without consciousness. (The difference is that consciousness can change or mod

Probably possible, yes. Subconscious drives are a thing. You could have sentience without consciousness. (The difference is that consciousness can change or modify drives and recognize its own actions on the world - its own agency. It is related to sentience and the line between the two is thin and blurry.) I'm not sure it is possible to be conscious without having been at some point sentient. The idea was that such an AI would never question its priorities or change them, not that it wouldn't be able to solve novel problems. (Which is the definition of intelligence, duh. And shows how far we're from that. What we have is glorified pattern matching algorithms and some basic symbolic logic and clustering.)