[adamzwasserman]

The substrate argument is the wrong hill for Pollan to die on. The stronger version isn't "meat vs. silicon" — it's that brains are value-making machines operating under evolutionary pressure, and no current AI architecture has anything analogous to that. You can simulate the outputs of valuation without having the mechanism. The question isn't whether consciousness can exist in another substrate, it's whether you can get there without the thing that actually drives human cognition: spontaneous assignment of moral and survival value with no prior programming.

[waffletower]

AI is an extension and acceleration of so called "evolutionary pressure". But so far AI models lack both agency and consciousness, and do not "experience" this pressure, though they are entirely defined by it. They can also explain this relationship to you.

[adamzwasserman]

That's true in the same sense that agriculture and nuclear weapons are extensions of evolutionary pressure. Everything humans produce is, by definition. But it empties the term of any useful meaning.

The distinction that matters: evolutionary pressure operates through differential survival across generations, where the organism has skin in the game. AI models are optimized via gradient descent on loss functions that humans define. That's artificial selection toward human objectives, not evolutionary pressure in any meaningful sense. The model has no stake in the outcome. Nothing is at risk for it.

You actually make this point yourself in your second sentence: they "lack both agency and consciousness, and do not experience this pressure." I agree completely. But that's precisely why the first sentence doesn't do any work. If they don't experience it, then calling it evolutionary pressure is metaphorical at best. And the metaphor obscures the exact gap we should be paying attention to: the absence of anything at stake.