Backprop doesn't happen in us, but I think our neurones still do gradient descent – synapses that fire together, wire together.
And ultimately, at the deepest level we can analyse, our brains' atoms are doing quantum field diffusion equations, which you can also do in an Excel spreadsheet, so that kind of reductionism doesn't help either.
> Humans are living beings with needs and rights. A person being able to legally squat in a home doesn't mean that a drone occupying property for some amount of time also has squatter's rights, even though you could easily and affordably automate and scale the deployment of drones to live and hide away on properties long enough to attain rights regarding properties all over the country.
Yes, but we can also do tissue cultures and crude bioprinting, so it's a very foreseeable future where exactly the same argument will also be true for living organisms rather than digital minds.
We need to figure out what the deeper rules are that lead to the status quo, not merely mimic the superficial result. The latter is how cargo cults function.