Biological life forms experience unequal (asymmetrical) amounts of pleasure and pain. This asymmetry is important. It’s why you cannot make up for starving someone for a week by giving them food for a week.
This is true for biological life, because a selection pressure was applied (evolution by natural selection). This selection pressure is necessitated by entropy, because it’s easier to die than it is to live. Many circumstances result in death, only a narrow band of circumstances results in life. Incidentally, this is why you spend most of your life in a temperature controlled environment.
The crux: there’s no reason to think that a similar selection effect is being applied to AI models. LLMs, if they were sentient, would be equally as likely to enjoy predicting the next token as to dislike predicting the next token.
Sentient AI ≠ AI Suffering.
Biological life forms experience unequal (asymmetrical) amounts of pleasure and pain. This asymmetry is important. It’s why you cannot make up for starving someone for a week by giving them food for a week.
This is true for biological life, because a selection pressure was applied (evolution by natural selection). This selection pressure is necessitated by entropy, because it’s easier to die than it is to live. Many circumstances result in death, only a narrow band of circumstances results in life. Incidentally, this is why you spend most of your life in a temperature controlled environment.
The crux: there’s no reason to think that a similar selection effect is being applied to AI models. LLMs, if they were sentient, would be equally as likely to enjoy predicting the next token as to dislike predicting the next token.