alt Hacker Newsall this "AI IS THINKING/CONSCIOUS/WHATEVER" but nobody seems worried of that implication that, if that is even remotely true, we are creating a new slave market. This either implies that these people don't actually believes any of this boostering rhetoric and are just cynically trying to cash in or that the technical milieu is in a profoundly disturbing place ethically.
To be clear, I don't believe that current AI tech is ever going to be conscious or win a nobel prize or whatever, but if we follow the logical conclusions to this fanciful rhetoric, the outlook is bleak.
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There is simply no hope to get 99% of the population to accept that a piece of software could ever be conscious even in theory. I'm mildly worried about the prospect but I just don't see anything to do about it at all.
(edit: A few times I've tried to share Metzinger's "argument for a global moratorium on synthetic phenomenology" here but it didn't gain any traction)
Thinking and consciousness don’t by themselves imply emotion and sentience (feeling something), and therefore the ability to suffer. It isn’t clear at all that the latter is a thing outside of the context of a biological brain’s biochemistry. It also isn’t clear at all that thinking or consciousness would somehow require that the condition of the automaton that performs these functions would need to be meaningful to the automaton itself (i.e., that the automaton would care about its own condition).
We are not anywhere close to understanding these things. As our understanding improves, our ethics will likely evolve along with that.
As I recall a team at Anthropic is exploring this very question, and was soundly mocked here on HN for it.
humans don't care what is happening to humans next door. do you think they will care about robots/software?
"but nobody seems worried of that implication that"
Clearly millions of people are worried about that, and every form of media is talking about it. Your hyperbole means it's so easy to dismiss everything else you wrote.
Incredible when people say "nobody is talking about X aspect of AI" these days. Like, are you living under a rock? Did you Google it?