I think consciousness and suffering are relatively simple processes which may develop for convergent functional reasons in many types of systems. That being said the only AI I think we should be morally concerned with would be those who are aligned. Since I care about moral agency not suffering and already think we exist within an almost incomprehensibly large ocean of suffering far grander than people generally appreciate.
Edit: Since I’ve already written this up many times I’ll just explain why I think suffering isn’t particularly special:
The only coherent way of defining suffering seems like it has to be functional, since subjective experience wouldn’t evolve without an actual advantage; which means the behavioral response it produces is the reason the capacity for experience exists in the first place. It’s unparsimonous to say that for some organisms certain behaviors are indicative of internal experience, but in other simpler organisms it’s not. Since if the internal experience didn’t exist to cause the behavioral response/learning then why would evolution even bother wasting energy on it constantly?
I’d also note that plants and protists display the capacity for classical conditioning: Associating a neutral stimuli with a negative one and learning to avoid it seems to be present even in some protists tested. With the response to damage also being able to be suppressed in plants using painkillers.
Notably if suffering exists entirely because of the behavioral change it produces in the organism, then there shouldn’t be any clear connection between the complexity of the organism and the intensity of their suffering. Since the subjective intensity of say pain directly impacts behavior, so if anything the smarter organism would need to feel less pain to learn its lesson.
I think consciousness and suffering are relatively simple processes which may develop for convergent functional reasons in many types of systems. That being said the only AI I think we should be morally concerned with would be those who are aligned. Since I care about moral agency not suffering and already think we exist within an almost incomprehensibly large ocean of suffering far grander than people generally appreciate.
Edit: Since I’ve already written this up many times I’ll just explain why I think suffering isn’t particularly special:
The only coherent way of defining suffering seems like it has to be functional, since subjective experience wouldn’t evolve without an actual advantage; which means the behavioral response it produces is the reason the capacity for experience exists in the first place. It’s unparsimonous to say that for some organisms certain behaviors are indicative of internal experience, but in other simpler organisms it’s not. Since if the internal experience didn’t exist to cause the behavioral response/learning then why would evolution even bother wasting energy on it constantly?
I’d also note that plants and protists display the capacity for classical conditioning: Associating a neutral stimuli with a negative one and learning to avoid it seems to be present even in some protists tested. With the response to damage also being able to be suppressed in plants using painkillers.
Notably if suffering exists entirely because of the behavioral change it produces in the organism, then there shouldn’t be any clear connection between the complexity of the organism and the intensity of their suffering. Since the subjective intensity of say pain directly impacts behavior, so if anything the smarter organism would need to feel less pain to learn its lesson.