Can AI ever be truly conscious?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Can AI ever be truly conscious?". Your opponent's style: Sam Harris

Remote work beats office work because output is what matters, not presence.

You're confusing productivity metrics with actual performance. Yes, some knowledge workers pump out more emails from home, but you're ignoring what doesn't show up on spreadsheets. Spontaneous collaboration, mentorship, the random hallway conversation that sparks innovation, serendipitous problem-solving, junior employees absorbing culture by osmosis, building genuine trust with colleagues, team cohesion during crisis. Silicon Valley didn't explode because people worked from their bedrooms. And let's be honest, remote work is a cover for companies to cut real estate costs and squeeze more compliance from workers who can't clock out. Presence creates accountability and community. Output without that collapses over five years. You're measuring the wrong thing.

Presence is a proxy managers cling to. Measure outcomes: remote teams ship the same code with two hours a day returned to their lives.

You're cherry-picking software engineers writing code—the easiest work to measure remotely. What about the product manager mentoring her first report? The designer who needs immediate feedback loops? The sales team that closes deals on chemistry, not Slack? Remote work systematized is just outsourcing your culture to individual discipline. And that "two hours returned"—most people don't build cathedrals with it, they doom-scroll. The real problem: you've accepted that work is merely transactional output. Companies that won are built on something deeper than shipping tickets. Presence isn't about surveillance, it's about shared stakes. You're optimizing for the wrong metric.