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Some, inspired by technologists and ethicists like Sebo — who will advocate for an expansive moral circle that includes sentient AI — are likely to argue that consciousness, wherever it arises, deserves moral respect.

“Then, I just flopped back down on my back and experienced this overwhelming feeling of absolute bliss,” Leier, an ethicist at the University of Alberta in Canada, told Salon in a phone interview.

As an ethicist, her role was to ask questions, including uncomfortable ones: “Is this a good thing?”

In medicine, when there is genuine uncertainty as to whether the benefits of a treatment outweigh the harms - called equipoise - some ethicists argue there's a moral obligation to scientifically study such treatments.

Eli Shupe, a medical ethicist at the University of Texas at Arlington and the author of the paper, said she was shocked to learn about this practice.