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>Whether or not it's conscious along the way is largely irrelevant.

It's certainly relevant whether your AI technique involves creating conscious, suffering beings!

Relevance is relative. So, relevant to whom? It would of course be relevant to the consciousness created, but how would the creator/programmer of the AI even recognize it as being conscious?

Correct: not everyone would care whether they're creating a suffering, conscious being, or think about the topic enough to consider it a possibility. I still think the issue merits being called "relevant" in the context where I mentioned it.

I agree with you, but... until we have some sort of "Test For Consciousness", I think it's safe to assume that we're not going to accidentally create consciousness just by writing computer programs --- even if the programs themselves do happen to make use of damn fine algorithms "inspired by nature".

I think the more immediate concern is that we begin to turn over everyday life-and-death decisions (driving, obvs) to machines which are, at the end of the day, unconscious, and programmed by us oh-so-fallible human beings.

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