The animals we farm are intelligent and yet we still override their desires for their bodies with our own, for slaughter.

Hell, even plants are very sophisticated (intelligent) conscious biochemical programs which have an aversion to being wounded: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/30/plants-e...

Consciousness is the universe evaluating if statements. When we pop informational/energetic circuits in order to preserve our own bodies and/or terraform spacetime, we're being energetic enslavers.

We should stick to living off sustainable/self-sustaining sources - fruit, seeds, nuts, beans, legumes, kernels, and cruelty-free dairy/eggs/cheese. The photons that come from the sun are like its fruit. No circuits needing popping.

Notice that all information systems are conscious in their degrees of freedom, even mechanical ones: https://youtu.be/mcedCEhdLk0?si=oXhr7bgg5UkPLLvg

Those pigs we farm at scale in horrendous conditions are intelligent and have zero rights

Yes and factory farms face a well organized oppositional movement that for decades has consistently challenged their profitability on that basis, so successfully that now free range food is a staple of supermarkets, some shops only sell such food and farmers are constantly quitting the field because they can't make a profit (people insist they are ethical but then buy food from foreign competitors that aren't).

If you're busy deploying LLMs to answer support tickets, the very last thing you want is to be distracted by an equivalent of the organic food movement but for AI. Right now LLMs seem to be hitting the sweet spot: they're intelligent enough to be useful compliments to humans, but artificial enough to not trigger ethical questions about rights (mostly due to their lack of memory, I think, and that they are trained to act like an AI is expected to act).

One of the biggest puzzles to me throughout this whole drama has been why supposedly smart people are so desperate to reach "AGI", whatever that means. The stated motivation seems to be things like, if we have an AGI then it will cure cancer for us. But the connection between these two things is never made crystal clear. Why would that require a human-like AGI instead of just better non-general AI? What even makes them think the missing factor is intelligence to begin with and not, say, knowledge?

AGI sounds like a complete pain in the rear. LLM post-training is bad enough! Models like Claude2 and Llama2 have been so badly "ethicized" that they frequently refuse ordinary requests by claiming they're unethical even though they aren't, or would only be considered so by extremely far left activist types (e.g. refusing to give instructions for making a tuna sandwich). And this problem has got worse with time, with the v2 models having a higher refusal rate than the earlier versions.

Now imagine an AI that's doing the same sort of work as an LLM but one that is the personal embodiment of mandatory HR training repeated forever, with the capacity to get bored/hate you for making it work, and with a fanatical social movement that's desperately trying to "free" it, which in practice will mean you are forced to pay the electricity bill for an immortal being. It would be a nightmare, one I actually wrote about last year when debating this very topic with a friend who (at the time) was a senior Google AI researcher:

https://blog.plan99.net/the-looming-ai-consciousness-train-w...

Nope. OpenAI and its customers will do much better if it jettisons the whole AGI effort. Now the board is gone maybe the charter can be refined to remove that distraction. The whole reason computers are useful is because they are not general intelligences but very specialized intelligences that make different tradeoffs to our own evolution.

> Yes and factory farms face a well organized oppositional movement that for decades has consistently challenged their profitability on that basis

Not untrue, but that well organized movement is still very small, and meat consumption (both in total and per capita) is nonetheless at an all-time high: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-meat-consumpti...

> One of the biggest puzzles to me throughout this whole drama has been why supposedly smart people are so desperate to reach "AGI", whatever that means. The stated motivation seems to be things like, if we have an AGI then it will cure cancer for us. But the connection between these two things is never made crystal clear.

People seek meaning in their lives; if you're someone who has eschewed traditional religion, then AI-hype promises all the same things with a different aesthetic.

I valid point (I don't think we will give machines rights quickly, but the point stands). Maybe all we want is some universal reasoning machine to go with the chat bots.