I get the feeling that research is circling around consciousness arising from quantum effects inside nerve cells. If it’s not that, and it’s just an emergent property of complex neural networks, then:

• smaller animals are less conscious (note, I’m not saying intelligent) than humans, and
• we are all fucked, because AI definitely is/will become conscious, and when that happens Terminator will come true.

I’ve noticed a significant change in my Facebook feed recently. It’s almost all content creator content now, which I’m taking as a sign that my network is no longer posting there.

True.

I’m not anti-Fediverse here, but tbf it would be ridiculously easy for data harvesting companies to plug into the API and fingerprint individual users from their activity. Admittedly, I don’t see how browser based fingerprinting could be done without hosting an instance.

To be fair, that’s true of most social media, including Reddit.