> If you're going to be a vegan, then presumably you care about non-human consciousness. So what's wrong with a future with flourishing AI and without humanity?

> If you're going to be a vegan, then presumably you care about non-human consciousness. So what's wrong with a future with flourishing AI and without humanity? Not necessarily anything, but a pretty mainstream view now is that dangerous AIs need not be conscious (and indeed, that AIs can still be dangerous even if it's somehow impossible for an AI to be conscious). So you could imagine futures in which an AI conquers the world but has no experiences and can't either flourish or fail to flourish. A computer virus is a familiar existing example of software that can be dangerous but that could probably not be said to flourish, even if it spreads widely, accomplishes everything it's programmed to do, and persists indefinitely. So we could envision dangerous AIs that are like today's computer viruses but that are also programmed to cause some kind of effect in the outside world, and that have some ability to learn and adapt so that it's difficult to prevent the effect and difficult to remove or deactivate the virus. That could be pretty dangerous to have active anywhere on the Internet, but still probably couldn't be said to flourish.