My thoughts on the issue:
Humans are conscious in whatever way that word is normally used
Our brains are made of matter
I think it’s likely we’ll be able to use matter to make other conscious minds
These minds may be able to replicate far faster than our own
A huge amount of future consciousness may be non-human
The wellbeing of huge chunks of funture consciousness are worthy of our concern
Forecasting is hard and it’s not clear how valuable early AI safety work was (maybe it led to much more risk ??)
Early work on AI welfare might quite plausibly make the problem worse.
Part of me would like to get better calibrated on which interventions work and which don’t before hugely focusing on such an important issue
Part of me would like to fund general state capacity work and train experts to be in a better place when this happens
My thoughts on the issue:
Humans are conscious in whatever way that word is normally used
Our brains are made of matter
I think it’s likely we’ll be able to use matter to make other conscious minds
These minds may be able to replicate far faster than our own
A huge amount of future consciousness may be non-human
The wellbeing of huge chunks of funture consciousness are worthy of our concern
Forecasting is hard and it’s not clear how valuable early AI safety work was (maybe it led to much more risk ??)
Early work on AI welfare might quite plausibly make the problem worse.
Part of me would like to get better calibrated on which interventions work and which don’t before hugely focusing on such an important issue
Part of me would like to fund general state capacity work and train experts to be in a better place when this happens