In late June, the Forum will be holding a debate week (almost definitely) on the topic of digital minds. Like the AI pause debate week, I’ll encourage specific authors who have thoughts on this issue to post, but all interested Forum users are also encouraged to take part. Also, we will have an interactive banner to track Forum user’s opinions and how they change throughout the week.
I’m still formulating the exact debate statement, so I’m very open for input here! I’d like to see people discuss: whether digital minds should be an EA cause area, how bad putting too much or too little effort into digital minds could be, and whether there are any promising avenues for further work in the domain. I’d like a statement which is fairly clear, so that the majority of debate doesn’t end up being semantic.
The debate statement will be a value statement of the form ‘X is the case’ rather than a prediction ‘X will happen before Y’. For example, we could discuss how much we agree with the statement ‘Digital minds should be a top 5 EA cause area’—but this is specific suggestion is uncomfortably vague.
Do you have any suggestions for alternative statements? I’m also open to feedback on the general topic. Feel free to dm rather than comment if you prefer.
In late June, the Forum will be holding a debate week (almost definitely) on the topic of digital minds. Like the AI pause debate week, I’ll encourage specific authors who have thoughts on this issue to post, but all interested Forum users are also encouraged to take part. Also, we will have an interactive banner to track Forum user’s opinions and how they change throughout the week.
I’m still formulating the exact debate statement, so I’m very open for input here! I’d like to see people discuss: whether digital minds should be an EA cause area, how bad putting too much or too little effort into digital minds could be, and whether there are any promising avenues for further work in the domain. I’d like a statement which is fairly clear, so that the majority of debate doesn’t end up being semantic.
The debate statement will be a value statement of the form ‘X is the case’ rather than a prediction ‘X will happen before Y’. For example, we could discuss how much we agree with the statement ‘Digital minds should be a top 5 EA cause area’—but this is specific suggestion is uncomfortably vague.
Do you have any suggestions for alternative statements? I’m also open to feedback on the general topic. Feel free to dm rather than comment if you prefer.
after EAG conversations, my current best guess for the debate statement is “the future will be worse if we create artificial sentience”
I really like your suggested post-EAG debate statement, Toby!
Other suggested debate topics:
1. Digital Minds will possess sentience or moral status
2. It is a moral obligation to develop protections for digital minds