There are people who think Google Maps is a tiny bit conscious (the union of computational functionalists and panpsychists), to resolve the dilemma of some magical binary threshold.
Root commenter here: I'm... almost one of those people. I suspect the fallacy is that we vastly underestimate the gulf in complexity between a human-written algorithm and a minimally-conscious creature like a bug. Probably the light switches on somewhere between these two things.
We may also be overestimating the richness and complexity of an LLM relative to a human when we entertain these possibilities, but who knows.
When a honey bee does its little dance to communicate to its sisters where the foods at, similarly to Google Maps computing and communicating the shortest path to your destination, is the bee conscious?
Yeah, probably. At least a little bit.
Are 80,000 bees conscious, or more conscious? Well, they’re definitely capable of some emergent behaviours that one be alone can’t achieve.
We may also be overestimating the richness and complexity of an LLM relative to a human when we entertain these possibilities, but who knows.