Super cool! I’ll preorder. Also, I’m sure Jeff won’t mind me flagging a similar upcoming book from Jonathan Birch, in case anybody is interested in reading both:
Can octopuses feel pain and pleasure?
What about crabs, shrimps, insects or spiders?
How do we tell whether a person unresponsive after severe brain injury might be suffering?
When does a fetus in the womb start to have conscious experiences?
Could there even be rudimentary feelings in miniature models of the human brain, grown from human stem cells?
… and what about AI?
These are questions about the edge of sentience, and they are subject to enormous, disorienting uncertainty. The stakes are immense, and neglecting the risks can have terrible costs.
We need to err on the side of caution, yet it’s often far from clear what ‘erring on the side of caution’ should mean in practice. When are we going too far? When are we not doing enough?
The Edge of Sentience presents a precautionary framework designed to help us reach ethically sound, evidence-based decisions despite our uncertainty.
Yes, thanks for noting this Ben! Very, very excited about The Edge of Sentience—Jonathan and I traded drafts a while ago, and I think that his book is going to be a big deal. And happily the books will pair well together; they both argue for moral circle expansion on precautionary grounds, but they have different areas of focus in a way that makes them nicely complementary.
Super cool! I’ll preorder. Also, I’m sure Jeff won’t mind me flagging a similar upcoming book from Jonathan Birch, in case anybody is interested in reading both:
Yes, thanks for noting this Ben! Very, very excited about The Edge of Sentience—Jonathan and I traded drafts a while ago, and I think that his book is going to be a big deal. And happily the books will pair well together; they both argue for moral circle expansion on precautionary grounds, but they have different areas of focus in a way that makes them nicely complementary.
Thanks for preordering my book as well! :)