This is a stimulating and impressively broad post.
I want to press a bit on whether these trends are necessarily bad—I think they are, but there are a few reasons why I wonder about it.
1) Secrecy: While secrecy makes it difficult or impossible to know if a system is a moral patient, it also prevents rogue actors from quickly making copies of a sentient system or obtaining a blueprint for suffering. (It also prevents rogue actors from obtaining a blueprint for flourishing, which supports your point.) How do you think about this?
2 and 3) If I understand correctly, the worry here is that AI multiplies at a speed that outpaces our understanding, making it less likely that humanity handles digital minds wisely. Some people are bullish on digital minds (i.e., think they would be good in and of themselves). Some also think other architectures would be more likely to be sentient than transformers. Wider exploration and AI-driven innovation plausibly have the effect of just increasing the population of digital minds. How do you weigh this against the other considerations?
While secrecy makes it difficult or impossible to know if a system is a moral patient, it also prevents rogue actors from quickly making copies of a sentient system or obtaining a blueprint for suffering.
There is definitely a scenario in which secrecy works out for the best. Suppose AI companies develop recognizably conscious systems in secret that they don’t deploy, or deploy only with proper safeguards. If they had publicized how to build them, then it is possible that others would go ahead and be less responsible. The open source community raises some concerns. I wouldn’t want conscious AI systems to be open-sourced if it was feasible to run them on hardware anyone could afford. Still, I think the dangers here are relatively modest: it seems unlikely that rogue actors will run suffering AI on a large scale in the near future.
The scenario I’m most worried about is one in which the public favors policies about digital minds that are divorced from reality. Perhaps they grant rights and protections to all and only AIs that behave in sufficiently overt human-like ways. This would be a problem if human-likeness is not a good guide to moral status, either because many inhuman systems have moral status or many human-like systems lack it. Hiding the details from experts would make it more likely that we attribute moral status to the wrong AIs: AIs that trigger mind-recognizing heuristics from our evolutionary past, or AIs that the creators want us to believe are moral subjects.
2 and 3) If I understand correctly, the worry here is that AI multiplies at a speed that outpaces our understanding, making it less likely that humanity handles digital minds wisely. Some people are bullish on digital minds (i.e., think they would be good in and of themselves). Some also think other architectures would be more likely to be sentient than transformers. Wider exploration and AI-driven innovation plausibly have the effect of just increasing the population of digital minds. How do you weigh this against the other considerations?
My primary worry is getting ahead of ourselves and not knowing what to say about the first systems that come off as convincingly conscious. This is mostly a worry in conjunction with secrecy, but the wider we explore and the quicker we do it, the less time there will be for experts to process the details, even if they have access in principle. There are other worries for exploration even if we do have proper time to assess the systems we build, but it may make it more likely that we will see digital minds and I’m an optimist that any digital minds we create will be more likely to have good lives than bad.
If experts don’t know what to say about new systems, the public may make up its own mind.
There could be knee-jerk reactions from skepticism in LLMs that are unwarranted in the context of new systems. Or there could be a credulity about the new systems that would be as inappropriate as it is for LLMs if you knew the details and not just the marketing.
The more experts are forced to throw up their hands and say “we’ve got no idea what to say about these things” the more likely we are to adopt commitments in ignorance that would turn out bad in the long run.
I think it may be quite hard to contract the moral circle once it includes agentic, social, and immortal AI systems. If we give them political and legal rights. If we welcome them into our homes and friend circles, etc. it may prove difficult to say “whoops, we were too taken in by your charms, no rights for you anymore!”. Similarly, if companies build an industry off the back of conscious AIs without recognizing it, they may be much more resistant to adopting new regulations that threaten their interests. The pressures against recategorizing existing AIs might also count against properly categorizing novel AIs, so if the justification for protecting new systems would undermine the justification for respecting existing systems, it may turn out to be a difficult argument to make.
This is a stimulating and impressively broad post.
I want to press a bit on whether these trends are necessarily bad—I think they are, but there are a few reasons why I wonder about it.
1) Secrecy: While secrecy makes it difficult or impossible to know if a system is a moral patient, it also prevents rogue actors from quickly making copies of a sentient system or obtaining a blueprint for suffering. (It also prevents rogue actors from obtaining a blueprint for flourishing, which supports your point.) How do you think about this?
2 and 3) If I understand correctly, the worry here is that AI multiplies at a speed that outpaces our understanding, making it less likely that humanity handles digital minds wisely. Some people are bullish on digital minds (i.e., think they would be good in and of themselves). Some also think other architectures would be more likely to be sentient than transformers. Wider exploration and AI-driven innovation plausibly have the effect of just increasing the population of digital minds. How do you weigh this against the other considerations?
There is definitely a scenario in which secrecy works out for the best. Suppose AI companies develop recognizably conscious systems in secret that they don’t deploy, or deploy only with proper safeguards. If they had publicized how to build them, then it is possible that others would go ahead and be less responsible. The open source community raises some concerns. I wouldn’t want conscious AI systems to be open-sourced if it was feasible to run them on hardware anyone could afford. Still, I think the dangers here are relatively modest: it seems unlikely that rogue actors will run suffering AI on a large scale in the near future.
The scenario I’m most worried about is one in which the public favors policies about digital minds that are divorced from reality. Perhaps they grant rights and protections to all and only AIs that behave in sufficiently overt human-like ways. This would be a problem if human-likeness is not a good guide to moral status, either because many inhuman systems have moral status or many human-like systems lack it. Hiding the details from experts would make it more likely that we attribute moral status to the wrong AIs: AIs that trigger mind-recognizing heuristics from our evolutionary past, or AIs that the creators want us to believe are moral subjects.
My primary worry is getting ahead of ourselves and not knowing what to say about the first systems that come off as convincingly conscious. This is mostly a worry in conjunction with secrecy, but the wider we explore and the quicker we do it, the less time there will be for experts to process the details, even if they have access in principle. There are other worries for exploration even if we do have proper time to assess the systems we build, but it may make it more likely that we will see digital minds and I’m an optimist that any digital minds we create will be more likely to have good lives than bad.
If experts don’t know what to say about new systems, the public may make up its own mind. There could be knee-jerk reactions from skepticism in LLMs that are unwarranted in the context of new systems. Or there could be a credulity about the new systems that would be as inappropriate as it is for LLMs if you knew the details and not just the marketing.
The more experts are forced to throw up their hands and say “we’ve got no idea what to say about these things” the more likely we are to adopt commitments in ignorance that would turn out bad in the long run.
I think it may be quite hard to contract the moral circle once it includes agentic, social, and immortal AI systems. If we give them political and legal rights. If we welcome them into our homes and friend circles, etc. it may prove difficult to say “whoops, we were too taken in by your charms, no rights for you anymore!”. Similarly, if companies build an industry off the back of conscious AIs without recognizing it, they may be much more resistant to adopting new regulations that threaten their interests. The pressures against recategorizing existing AIs might also count against properly categorizing novel AIs, so if the justification for protecting new systems would undermine the justification for respecting existing systems, it may turn out to be a difficult argument to make.