Mary Martin

At its most basic interpretation, then,

the concept of rights for other animals entails a right to bodily integrity, autonomy, and life.

The sleeping giant is one name for the public; when it wakes up, when we wake up, we are no longer only the public: we are civil society, the superpower whose nonviolent means are sometimes, for a shining moment, more powerful than violence, more powerful than regimes and armies.

When people suppressed their fearful thoughts, as opposed to vividly imagining them, they were markedly less anxious about those thoughts later. They also rated their fears as less vivid and remembered them less.

if an animal

’

s life is worth

living without having a point and without being meaningful in any of the usual senses, then

perhaps a human life can also be worth living without that.

scientific investigations of the boundaries between conscious and unconscious systems are urgently needed, and they cite ethical, legal and safety issues that make it crucial to understand AI consciousness. For example, if AI develops consciousness, should people be allowed to simply switch it off after use?

If consciousness really can arise in a jumble of silicon chips, we run the risk of creating countless AIs — beings, really — that can not only intelligently perform tasks, but develop feelings about their lives. 

…

Rather than asking if each new AI system is finally the one that has conscious experience, focusing on the more fundamental question of

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