Do you have any thoughts on the feasibility of extending your framework to estimate the welfare range of non-biological systems, namely advanced AI models like GPT-4? It naively looks like some of the models you considered to estimate the welfare ranges could apply to AI systems. I wish discussions about artificial sentience moved from “is this AI system sentient” to “what is the expected welfare range of this AI system”...
Short version: strongly agree with you about the importance of shifting the conversation from sentience to welfare ranges, but I think that the issue is basically intractable given hedonism at this juncture, as we have no reason to think that any of the states that could be mental states in AI systems are type identical to any of the states in biological organisms. It isn’t intractable given other theories of welfare, though, and depending on your views about what moral weights represent, a “moral weight” for AI systems might still be available. However, we’d need a different methodology for that than the one we outline here.
Hi Bob,
Do you have any thoughts on the feasibility of extending your framework to estimate the welfare range of non-biological systems, namely advanced AI models like GPT-4? It naively looks like some of the models you considered to estimate the welfare ranges could apply to AI systems. I wish discussions about artificial sentience moved from “is this AI system sentient” to “what is the expected welfare range of this AI system”...
Short version: strongly agree with you about the importance of shifting the conversation from sentience to welfare ranges, but I think that the issue is basically intractable given hedonism at this juncture, as we have no reason to think that any of the states that could be mental states in AI systems are type identical to any of the states in biological organisms. It isn’t intractable given other theories of welfare, though, and depending on your views about what moral weights represent, a “moral weight” for AI systems might still be available. However, we’d need a different methodology for that than the one we outline here.