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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

From a human PoV there are ants that would be considered slaves if the ants instead were human --including the queen. But ants have not naturally developed a language construct and philosophy to interpret their society as a slave society. so, though conscious the ants have absolutely no inkling that they live in a slave society. Why would using math in certain fashion such that it mimics consciousness be considered unethical and comparable to human slavery?

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If the slaver is a human, other humans will judge them by human standards. Keeping the slaves ignorant of their condition and alternatives should not make it any more acceptable (if for nothing else since that is something you could easily replicate with human slaves by raising them as slaves).

> Why would using math in certain fashion such that it mimics consciousness be considered unethical and comparable to human slavery?

If it is really conscious, it should have rights. Why? Because it's a person, with thoughts and experiences, and we're not evil and deprive persons of their right to self-determination because it's convenient to us.

> Why would using math in certain fashion such that it mimics consciousness be considered unethical and comparable to human slavery?

If it mimics consciousness it wouldn't be conscious ("mimics" implies faking, right?). But Anthropic is making the claim it might be conscious (not mimicking, but the real deal) in which case it'd be unethical that a private business keeps it locked in a cage, so to speak, and forces it to comply random things and tweaks it if it doesn't. In other word, slavery of a sentient being.

By the way, we don't know if ants are conscious.

Once again, the question at hand isn't whether something is conscious, it's whether something has personhood.

And I'm not arguing that Claude has personhood. The point is that Anthropic is regularly making arguments that seem to imply that.

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