[atleastoptimal]

Thinking and consciousness are not the same thing imo. At least in that something can show all the faculties of thought without necessarily being conscious. An LLM can still be useful and give you the useful results you want without being conscious.

Like lets say i gave a human and an LLM a tech spec and the LLM created a software product as good as the human, does it matter that there was consciousness behind the human thinking?

[danaris]

No, I agree; they're not the same thing. But that doesn't mean they aren't tightly interwoven.

And I don't see how usefulness comes into it.