Unless there are externally observable things that can't or are unlikely to be done without consciousness, which doesn't seem to be a solved question either.
You can assume that other people are conscious like you, and so you put ethical value on that. But then you're really putting ethical value on "being like me", irrespective of whether other people are or are not conscious.
I can't find flaw with that, but I wish it were not so. I want it to be about consciousness being special rather than brain structure chauvinism.
If it weren't, why would it have evolved in the first place? It seems me not unlikely that the only way we can accurately surmise what's going on inside the heads of other people (an obvious survival advantage) is to have that subjective experience of what's going on inside our own.
LLM definitely don’t suffer, and we are happy “shutting off” a dog which both can suffer and has some greater level of consciousness. So, yes, it’s fine to shut off LLMs
200 years ago, some societies were fine with slavery. Enough individuals rejected it and society changed.
What you say only works insofar as "ethics" means only the rules of your society and not any person or group; this would also reject the "E" from PETA, the USA declaration of independence, and the Suffragettes.
This happens globally. For 1000s of years. There is no global or even local movement to stop treating conscious animals any better… which is exactly my point, AI in its current state is less than that. So until we as a society want to tackle consciousness animals I don’t think we will tackle consciousness in AI