@lzg

Found it after some searching:

https://archive.ph/vHGue

But now, as an evolutionary biologist, I say the following. If these creatures are not conscious, then what the hell is consciousness for?

He's missing the point. Intelligent, conscious beings devised speech and came up with all human utterances. An LLM just copies and pastes bits of language that humans have already uttered. What the two entities do is not the same at all.

According to this theory, pain needs to be consciously felt in order to be sufficiently painful to resist overruling.

Again, no. If Dawkins had ever written an optimiser, he'd know that's not true. As you will know (but bystanders may not), you write a cost function (which says how bad a solution is) and a bit of code to find some configuration with a suitably low cost. If there's some configuration that you want to forbid absolutely, you give it such a high cost that the optimiser will never choose it. I've done this, and it works. There's no need to posit consciousness in a piece of software.

This article is sloppy in too many places for me to take it seriously. I agree with you: he has AI psychosis.