[ExI] LLMs plus AI Agents means Astroturfing gone wild and crazy

[BillK]

On Mon, 27 Apr 2026 at 18:42, John Clark via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org wrote:
> But what makes you believe that your fellow human beings are better at
that than Claude or Gemini? There must be some reason why you believe
computers are not conscious but also think that solipsism is not true. Is
it just that computers have brains that are soft and squishy while other
humans have brains that are hard and dry?
>
> John K Clark
> _______________________________________________


A senior staff scientist at Google’s artificial intelligence laboratory
DeepMind, Alexander Lerchner, argues *in a new paper*
<https://deepmind.google/research/publications/231971/?ref=404media.co>
that no AI or other computational system will ever become conscious.
"The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate But Not Instantiate
Consciousness".

<
https://www.404media.co/google-deepmind-paper-argues-llms-will-never-be-conscious/
>
Quote:
Lerchner’s paper argues that AGI without sentience is possible, saying that
“the development of highly capable Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)
does not inherently lead to the creation of a novel moral patient, but
rather to the refinement of a highly sophisticated, non-sentient tool.”
--------------------------------

Other cognitive scientists agree with his conclusions but are rather upset
that he hasn't cited any of their decades of research papers.  :)
BillK
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