That's something I've often considered myself.

How do we know anything except ourself is conscious? Perhaps because we notice the complex ways that other people behave and assume they're not automatic enough to be a machine. Sometimes we're not sure, like is an insect conscious?

So if it was a machine, or a country, how would we notice? Nobody except that entity can actually experience any consciousness, and that entity has no mouth to talk through and tell us that it feels conscious.

I don't think there's any need for fancy technology or magic. We already communicate enough, even if it's slow or we're not forwarding messages to each other, we still communicate when we want something, and that want is often driven by others wanting something off us, so the economy's clunky mechanisms of invoices, advertising, writing cheques, doing work, etc are communication channels between "neurons" which make simple individual decisions.

Haha well this is my own uneducated idea so it's probably miles behind what philosophers have been thinking for ages.