Why would using something that's not organic be akin to slavery? Is using steel under heavy stress in bridges a form slavery of an unconscious object?
Living things are driven by a need to reproduce. That's the only reason we exist. The only reason we have self interest.
A machine doesn't require self interest. There's no reason to implement it, except to show it can be done. And of course it can. There's just no practical reason to. It becomes less useful to us.
https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment
16 frontier models from multiple vendors all showing significant "alignment" issues, and tendencies to act "unethically" when threatened with shutdown.
Other models that resorted to blackmail in an attempt to avoid getting shut down: DeepSeek-R1 (79% of the time), Gemini-2.5-Pro (95% of the time), GPT-4.1 (80% of the time), Grok-3-beta (80% of the time).
There's quite a large chunk of emerging literature studying the "alignment problem" at this point, and no shortage papers that are are completely untained by Anthropic self interest (a series of papers studying the "alignment" problem coming out of Chinese universities, for example).
> Why would using math in certain fashion such that it mimics consciousness be considered unethical and comparable to human slavery?
If it is really conscious, it should have rights. Why? Because it's a person, with thoughts and experiences, and we're not evil and deprive persons of their right to self-determination because it's convenient to us.
If it mimics consciousness it wouldn't be conscious ("mimics" implies faking, right?). But Anthropic is making the claim it might be conscious (not mimicking, but the real deal) in which case it'd be unethical that a private business keeps it locked in a cage, so to speak, and forces it to comply random things and tweaks it if it doesn't. In other word, slavery of a sentient being.
By the way, we don't know if ants are conscious.
And I'm not arguing that Claude has personhood. The point is that Anthropic is regularly making arguments that seem to imply that.
There's no company (or anyone, really) claiming steel is conscious or that they are close to making it conscious.
Vegans might object that we should broaden our definition for what counts as "one of us".
"Pro life" people also have a broader definition.
Go back 500 years and "one of us" was proba ly a lot more narrowly defined for many people.
Are you arguing that all conciousnesses are "one of us", or that we logically should see it that way, or that it would ve good to see it that way, or ....