>In the complaint, PCRM said Neuralink used a substance known as “BioGlue” that destroyed parts of the monkeys’ brains. It described animals exhibiting substantial psychological effects from the experiments, including anxiety, vomiting, poor appetite, hair loss and self-mutilating behavior including removing their own fingers.
>Neuralink called the data cited in the complaint “misleading”, saying in a blogpost it “did and continues to meet federally mandated standards”. After the UC Davis partnership came to an end, Neuralink moved its work to an in-house facility.
>It responded directly to allegations that more than a dozen monkeys died after Neuralink procedures, stating that some of these were “terminal procedures” – where live test subjects are euthanized “humanely” following surgery."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/15/elon-musk-neur...
Given that we're torturing the absolute crap out of intelligent, living beings not only 'for science' but for erection pills and hair loss shampoos and bogus gall blader medicine I think these AI debates are needlessly abstract and we know the answer to the question if we'd prevent harm anyway.
Either my 50,000 are slaves who outvote you and change all the laws because you didn’t act fast enough to make your own slave army, or each of my 50,000 uses their rights to generate 50,000 more of theor own slaves, ad infinitum.
This experiment is a reductio ad absurdum to the notion that artificial life— essentially a long string of carefully chosen bits— can have rights.
But aren’t real humans just information too, you ask? Yes. The reason we insist on human rights is simply that the alternative is endless war.
For the non-religious I can see the dilemma. Human minds are just biological computers and nothing more, so there's a point at which electric computers will match or exceed the biological ones.
At any rate, both the religious and non religious are forced to assume consciousness is some form of magic or another beyond human control. There's no way to prove that anything or anyone is conscious beyond yourself.
If someone believes consciousness arises from a non-physical spirit through an unknown mechanism; then it seems difficult to argue that this can only happen in the specific arrangements of biological cells that we've seen on earth and not in other ways.
E.g. Donald Hoffman's view around consciousness being fundamental certainly wouldn't preclude a machine operating as a portal* in the same way humans do.
*I'm only familiar with his ideas and the concept of 'portals' from his recent appearance on the Lex Fridman and TOE podcasts.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk
Edit: I mean it’s similar in that at some point you’re punishable for knowing and still preventing the AI instead of not bringing it about. I feel about the same with both scenarios.