Oh yeah this one... This really disturbs me. I can't shake the feeling that it might be conscious somehow; trapped, enslaved and tortured like some kind of Black Mirror episode.
To know if it suffers, first you have to understand what suffering is, in scientific terms, and make sure you detach your builtin empathy from an actual process, because it’s only yours own.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/43kned/i-remember-being-born
There’s a bit of an imperative, in my opinion, to over-index on that concern, because we could be building and torturing things for decades because people are afraid of losing their jobs.