What's this about?
A Communications of the ACM opinion piece on anima machina, "herd acceptance", and the politics of conscious machines — the academic counterpart to a week otherwise dominated by incident reports and price cuts.
What exactly is "herd acceptance"?
The idea that beliefs about machine minds will be settled socially rather than empirically. There is no test that determines whether a system is conscious, so what actually decides the question is whether enough people start treating it as though it were. The piece's argument is that this makes it a political question, not a technical one — which is why the framing matters before the situation arrives.
What's the community saying?
The thread has the usual shape for consciousness discussions — disagreement about whether the question is meaningful at all — but with a newer practical edge, since Mollick's observation that people form strong attachments to their favourite model is exactly the herd-acceptance mechanism arriving early.