> Oh wow. My respect for Anthropic just dropped to zero; I had no idea they were entertaining ideas this stupid. > > In full agreement with OP; there is just about no justifiable basis to begin to ascribe consciousness to these things in this way. Can't think of a better use for the word "dehumanizing."

We cannot arbitrarily dismiss the basis for model welfare until we defined precisely conciousness and sapience, representing human thinking as a neural network running on an electrochemical substrate and placing it at the same level as an LLM is not neccessarily dehumanizing, I think model welfare is about expanding our respect for intelligence and not desacralizing human condition (cf: TNG "Measure of a man").

Also lets be honest, I don't think the 1% require any additional justification for thinking of the masses as consumable resource...