>>Already, there is an AI which can fly an F-15 as good as any military pilot
No there isn't.
The military has no fully automated F-15s. They have been unable to program 'hunches' and 'desires' into a computer. Many of the 'good' pilots operate with a lot of 'feeling'. The planes are computer aided and have autopilot, but that isn't for dogfights.
This all reminds me of an Isaac Asimov story about a supercomputer. But I do not want to get into that.
AI becomes life when it realizes the existence of itself to its entirety. This is the whole tree falling in the woods approach.
We put faces in clouds and on the ceilings of our rooms. We look for life where life doesn't exist. Put a robot in front of me that is covered in skin and shakes my hand and says 'how do you do?' and I will just assume it is human life.
But it isn't life until it 'realizes' (realization is definitely a steadier construct than intelligence) to itself, without the external simuli of someone already alive, that it is life and therefore a him/her and no longer an it.