[Balgair]

> On an ethical level, I think we need to understand whether we are creating thinking feeling creatures who will be doomed to suffer as data slaves before we normalize this

Though I agree with you, I think that's a bit alarmist. We're a very long ways away from this issue being something other than a thought experiment. The article states there is a 64 neuron chip that does not yet have customers and is not yet in production.

The Elephant brain has ~3 X 10^11 neurons in it, or a factor of 10^10 more neurons than the chip. Even assuming a doubling period as short as Moore's Law, we looking at ~50 years until this might be a problem we'd want to deal with.

I'd say we just wait and see how things play out for a few more doubling cycles before we start pulling at our hair.