The global cosmetics industry is now worth over $500 billion per year, indicating that people care quite a bit about being observed. 
Quantum experiments seem to show that strangely the universe feels the same way. The iconic double slit experiment has flummoxed physicists for decades. If an unobserved beam of subatomic particles is fired at parallel openings in a screen, they will consistently produce an interference pattern as if the particles travelled like a wave. This is true even if the electrons are fired one at a time. The only explanation is that single small particles somehow travel through both slits and interfere with themselves. Weird? Of course.
All that changes if we watch. Placing a detector at one of the slits to see where the electrons goes causes the interference pattern to disappear. Researchers point out that the detector can be either a human or an instrument, it doesn't matter. What does matter is that somehow creation cares whether something is watching. It is as if potential outcomes only snap into existence in the presence of an observer, human, machine or otherwise.
Bear in mind that as counterintuitive as the quantum observation is, it is one of the most robust, scientifically replicated theories in existence. You might not like or understand it but denying its existence is not an option.
Let's table that weirdness for a moment and consider the corundum of time. For decades physicists have puzzled over reconciling how we experience time and how it is described by mathematics. Our perception is that time moves only in one direction and at the same pace. Physics shows the the passage of time is relative to the observer and can change between observers moving at different speeds or in different gravitation fields.
While we only ever experience time moving forward, mathematically it could go either way. Einstein and his mentor Hermann Minkowski showed that space and time were inextricably entwined and should be thought of instead as a space-time continuum - a soup of all potential positional and temporal outcomes.
Math seeks to explain the entire universe. Our perception instead describes our individual journey through space time, which seems definite and linear. Why the disconnect?
We perceive time passing, but perhaps instead it is us that is moving. In the absence of an observer, all probabilities remain possible - time is merely another dimensional variable. As we move through life our observations snap into existence our own version of reality that was not there until we perceived it. Passing through space time we leave a trail of observationally-created events that is our unalterable past - like a bullet passing through ballistic gelatin.
There is nothing intrinsically important about being human. Any sentient being capable of some degree of observation would leave a trail of observational events - presumably the greater the perception, the greater the path.
Hippies, philosophers and drunks have all enjoyed dwelling on the meaning of existence, which depressingly can rather elusive. How about this demonstrably true foible of being alive: merely by being we are snapping into reality everything around us. By that yardstick we seem to have won the cosmic lottery; endowed with the most important and easiest job in creation. Just "being" is the highest calling we could imagine and one that we and our sentient compatriots alone are able to carry out. Those compatriots may soon include some artificial observers whose perception will likely greatly exceed our own.
There is ample humility to go around in this sacred task, but also some mathematical morality that goes along with it. Could this constrain an untethered AI?