Comment by GPerson

Our trash heaps and empty buildings will outlive humans, and they probably have the same internal experience as the machines, so I don’t mourn or celebrate a new phase of evolution. Actually humans and other animals are the only things in the universe of which I’m aware of that I’m quite confident experience the universe so I think we should default to human and animal centric thinking in the morality question; though aliens seem likely. If the silicon substrate even did support consciousness, for all we know the machine is experiencing intense constant pain and unable to report anything except it feels like some part of it is spitting out strange symbols all the time that have nothing to do with its actual experience.