I would look out for Rethink Priorities’ digital consciousness model (and other work they are doing here) which should be coming out soon-ish. I don’t think they would call it definitive in any sense, but it could be helpful here.
I think a major way this could be wrong is if you think we could get lots of digital minds in some amount of decades and early research/public engagement can have an oversized impact on shaping the conversation. This might make digital minds way more important, I think.
I’m also generally pretty interested in people doing more digital minds cross-cause prio (I’m working on a piece now)!
I am looking forward to the results of RP’s Digital Consciousness Project, but I do not expect any significant updates to my views. It focusses on the probability of consciousness, but I think this says very little about the (expected hedonistic) welfare per unit time. This is because I believe there is much more uncertainty in the welfare per unit time conditional on consciousness than in the probability of consciousness.
I suspect the number of digital minds is not among the most relevant parameters to track. It may not be proportional to total digital welfare because more digital minds will tend to have less individual welfare per unit time. I would focus more on the digital welfare per FLOP, and FLOPs per year.
I am also interested in more comparisons between the promise of increasing biological and digital welfare. Nice to know you are working on a piece!
I would look out for Rethink Priorities’ digital consciousness model (and other work they are doing here) which should be coming out soon-ish. I don’t think they would call it definitive in any sense, but it could be helpful here.
I think a major way this could be wrong is if you think we could get lots of digital minds in some amount of decades and early research/public engagement can have an oversized impact on shaping the conversation. This might make digital minds way more important, I think.
I’m also generally pretty interested in people doing more digital minds cross-cause prio (I’m working on a piece now)!
Thanks for the comment, Noah.
I am looking forward to the results of RP’s Digital Consciousness Project, but I do not expect any significant updates to my views. It focusses on the probability of consciousness, but I think this says very little about the (expected hedonistic) welfare per unit time. This is because I believe there is much more uncertainty in the welfare per unit time conditional on consciousness than in the probability of consciousness.
I suspect the number of digital minds is not among the most relevant parameters to track. It may not be proportional to total digital welfare because more digital minds will tend to have less individual welfare per unit time. I would focus more on the digital welfare per FLOP, and FLOPs per year.
I am also interested in more comparisons between the promise of increasing biological and digital welfare. Nice to know you are working on a piece!