It scares me that people think like this. Not only with respect to AI but in general, when it comes to other life forms, people seem to prefer to err on the side of convenience. The fact that cows could be experiencing something very similar to ourselves should send shivers down our spine. The same argument goes for future AGI.
I find it strange that people believe cows and sentient animals don’t believe something extremely similar to what we do.
Evolution means we all have common ancestors and are different branches of the same development tree.
So if we have sentience and they have sentience, which science keeps recognizing, belatedly, that non human animals do, shouldn’t the default presumption be our experiences are similar? Or at the very least their experience is similar to a human at an earlier stage of development, like a 2 year old?
Which is also an interesting case study given that out of convenience, humans also believed that toddlers also weren’t sentient and felt no pain, and so until not that long ago, our society would conduct all sorts of surgical procedures on babies without any sort of pain relief (circumcision being the most obvious).
It’s probably time we accept our fellow animals’s sentience and act on the obvious ethical implications of that instead of conveniently ignoring it like we did with little kids until recently.
This crowd would sooner believe silicon hardware (an arbitrary human invention from the 50s-60s) will have the physical properties required for consciousness than accept that they participate in torturing literally a hundred billion consciousness animals every year.
I’m actually a vegan because I believe cows have consciousness. I believe consciousness is the only trait worth considering when applying morality questions. Arbitrary hardware is conscious.
