But outside of the context of computing on devices: yes, as others have noted, the neurons we're trying to simulate in machine learning models aren't much different than our own. So, just look at any person to see how well neurons are suited to language/etc. workloads (or not, depending how clever the people around you are 😂)
As to ethics, consciousness is an "emergent phenomenon". It seems to arise, near as we can tell, from the interaction of many simple systems. No single cell or cluster thereof in a brain is conscious, but get them all working nearby one another and suddenly... 🎇