This is somewhat novel unlike say weapons manufacturing. Also assuming that the GP is in the tech community to some degree, it makes sense they’d have a stronger reaction.
There’s lots of bad stuff humans shouldn’t be doing.
Not sure why this is being downvoted. It’s a valid point. This neuron chip stuff is far less problematic than a lot of animal testing where you clearly have a whole organism that experiences something.
Factory farming too. The way we treat chickens in particular is out of a horror movie, and that’s in countries with some standards. Globally I’m sure many billions of animals are constantly submitted to the most grotesque torture for food.
I spoke inaccurately. I’m an ethical vegan and nonconsensual animal industry and testing is an atrocity, as it would be were we to substitute in humans.
That said, the novelty of this, the unknowns, the mind reels at all the possibilities here and it frankly makes me nauseous.
What hells of existence could we create? I have no doubt that we could create an all encompassing misery that is beyond our comprehension.
Sounds like you're applying scifi tropes to real life. Don't do that. That's why some people are developing "AI psychosis" today after playing with LLMs.
The fear is that we don’t really understand what causes consciousness. I think that’s a valid fear, because we can’t know ahead of time whether we will inadvertently create a “person” inside the machine.
Unless your proposition is that no collection of human neurons outside of live birth can become sentient, and I’m not sure how you’d arrive at that conclusion without invoking some kind of spiritual argument.
We know that neurons can produce subjective experience.
This is the first time in my life that I've felt a scientific avenue of research should shut down.