Does it even matter? Turns out you don’t need to be conscious to do useful intelligence based work.

Same for all the people who argue that they aren’t “intelligent” and don’t “know” things. Either they are/do, or that stuff isn’t as important as you’d think.

The only way it would matter is if you wanted to moralize about enslaving your computer or what it means to restart it.

> if you wanted to moralize about enslaving your computer

That is precisely the context of the debate. You seem to find it absurd, as do I, but the reason we're talking about whether LLMs are conscious in this thread has nothing to do with whether they are useful. It's because important people, such as Dario Amodei, are engaging in exactly the kind of moralising over "AI welfare" that you're scoffing at.