We need people who think clearly and rigorously about the belief that LLMs are conscious. People like Ted Chiang, whose recent piece in the Atlantic offers a grounded and clear refutation of what Silicon Valley claims is maybe, possibly, potentially, the emergence of consciousness in their products. This, of course, has major implications for how we think about the role of LLMs and whatever comes after, in our lives and in our organizations.
What I’m saying is that whatever protections our hypothetical conscious software would deserve if it were real, granting it those protections would be anything but easy. The abolition of chattel slavery involved enormous societal upheaval, and eliminating cruelty to animals will require rebuilding our entire food industry. Anthropic would have us believe that it is inventing a new category of being whose needs for protection require essentially no divergence from how a software company would treat an ordinary chatbot that lacks conscious experience. That’s so convenient that it’s simply not plausible.
