A pigeon deserves ethical consideration as a living creature not because of how it learns but because of what it feels.

“Is that not tantamount to introspection?” Wasserman asked.

“associative learning paradox”

there may be no need to invoke cognitive mechanisms at all.

experiential data will eclipse the scale and quality of human generated data. This paradigm shift, accompanied by algorithmic advancements in RL, will unlock in many domains new capabilities that surpass those possessed by any human.

A computer trained on reinforcement learning needs only search and memory, not reasoning or any other cognitive mechanism, in order to form associations and maximize rewards.