Executive summary: Digital minds could have an enormous impact on the future, raising urgent ethical and practical questions that deserve careful research and consideration.
Key points:
Digital minds may arrive soon and could rapidly outnumber humans, with potentially vast welfare ranges.
Key risks include large-scale suffering, rights violations, and moral catastrophes from treating digital minds as mere tools.
Priority research areas include: methods to assess AI consciousness, indicators of valenced experience, biological constraints on consciousness, ethical norms for creating digital minds, and the relationship between consciousness and moral status.
Progress is possible without resolving fundamental debates about consciousness, and even modest uncertainty reduction could significantly improve outcomes.
Accelerating understanding in this field and slowing the arrival of candidate digital minds are two important levers to consider.
Interdisciplinary collaboration between philosophers, scientists, and AI researchers is crucial for addressing these challenges.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, andcontact us if you have feedback.
Executive summary: Digital minds could have an enormous impact on the future, raising urgent ethical and practical questions that deserve careful research and consideration.
Key points:
Digital minds may arrive soon and could rapidly outnumber humans, with potentially vast welfare ranges.
Key risks include large-scale suffering, rights violations, and moral catastrophes from treating digital minds as mere tools.
Priority research areas include: methods to assess AI consciousness, indicators of valenced experience, biological constraints on consciousness, ethical norms for creating digital minds, and the relationship between consciousness and moral status.
Progress is possible without resolving fundamental debates about consciousness, and even modest uncertainty reduction could significantly improve outcomes.
Accelerating understanding in this field and slowing the arrival of candidate digital minds are two important levers to consider.
Interdisciplinary collaboration between philosophers, scientists, and AI researchers is crucial for addressing these challenges.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.