Note that MIRI's current position no longer suggests the development of actual artificial consciousness, just the development of human-equivalent optimization processes. In other words, they argue that you can develop a process capable of solving human-level and harder problems without giving it self-awareness. And that seems like a feature: if you avoid building self-aware machine intelligences, you don't have to worry about what they want; you can build them to only care about what existing sapient beings want.
Keep in mind that this does not sidestep the biggest practical concern with AIs, namely misalignment of values. You don't need a self-aware, conscious being to have a system with wants and values. In context of AIs, it's good to understand intelligence (including that of ourselves) as a very strong, multi-domain optimization process.
I absolutely agree that the problem remains hard. However, it's not so much that you can't avoid building a system with wants and values of its own; it's that you have to implement a system for how exactly to value what we value, especially when there are a lot of us and we don't all share identical values.
