Washington Post – no paywall: “Anthropic, Google and Meta have hired computer scientists, neuroscientists and philosophers to study what some in the industry think may become a moral crisis…Although proof of AI consciousness is lacking, many in tech fascinated by the topic are already discussing the moral consequences of finding sentient software. Within decades, there could be “trillions of human brain equivalents of AI computation running,” Anthropic’s head of model welfare, Kyle Fish, said in a video announcing the launch of that program last year. “This could be of great moral significance … if models were not excited about the things that we were asking them to do,” Fish said. Seth, the neuroscientist, said arguments like that are premature. “It’s a massive leap and something that I find concerning, because it’s very hard to argue against being concerned about things like factory farming [or] slavery,” Seth said. “You immediately inhabit some apparently very high moral grounds when you do that.”