@LynAldenContact: We're not there yet, but one d...

We're not there yet, but one day the debate over whether AIs are conscious and deserving of rights is going to be *insane*.

Imagine there being billions of entities, with a serious societal confusion on whether they actually experience things or not.

With complex animals like mammals and birds and others with complex brain structures that look like ours, we assume they are conscious like us and can suffer like us, because they're a lot like us physically.

Imagine entities that act like us, but with very different structures.

That's the "hard problem of consciousness" as proposed by Chalmers and others.

If we don't truly understand how consciousness works, but we make sufficiently complex robots/programs that are as capable as conscious entities, then the can of worms there is beyond comprehension.