I was quite worried when I saw the tweets going around, as well. I think the implications of the possibility of LLM sentience are already ethically quite large and biological computing intuitively has a much larger change of inducing sentience in the “computers”.
But I’m broadly not sold on the moratorium concept.
I mean, a global moratorium would definitely be the ethically careful choice to do here. But I think if even a couple of countries allow the building of these datacenters, and other countries allow the purchase of biological computing, then it would be important to act on this in other ways than moratoriums as well.
Something like mandating x amount of research into the ethical implications of this per y amount of spending on biological computing (e.g. a pigouvian tax that is earmarked to solving the ethical problems present) would be what I would primarily advocate, at least from my European point of view.
In the regions where the data centers are being built campaigning for a moratorium or slowdown and generally raising public awareness sounds like something that should be attempted and it should be possibly to sell people on the ethical implications of brain-based computing...
I agree that a moratorium alone may not be sufficient long term, but the broader issue is that there’s no regulatory infrastructure at all to enforce other alternatives. In the near term the goal would be to halt widespread commercialization so that such policies can be thoroughly discussed and implemented. Agreed that the public awareness piece seems broadly useful regardless of outcome.
I was quite worried when I saw the tweets going around, as well. I think the implications of the possibility of LLM sentience are already ethically quite large and biological computing intuitively has a much larger change of inducing sentience in the “computers”.
But I’m broadly not sold on the moratorium concept.
I mean, a global moratorium would definitely be the ethically careful choice to do here. But I think if even a couple of countries allow the building of these datacenters, and other countries allow the purchase of biological computing, then it would be important to act on this in other ways than moratoriums as well.
Something like mandating x amount of research into the ethical implications of this per y amount of spending on biological computing (e.g. a pigouvian tax that is earmarked to solving the ethical problems present) would be what I would primarily advocate, at least from my European point of view.
In the regions where the data centers are being built campaigning for a moratorium or slowdown and generally raising public awareness sounds like something that should be attempted and it should be possibly to sell people on the ethical implications of brain-based computing...
I agree that a moratorium alone may not be sufficient long term, but the broader issue is that there’s no regulatory infrastructure at all to enforce other alternatives. In the near term the goal would be to halt widespread commercialization so that such policies can be thoroughly discussed and implemented. Agreed that the public awareness piece seems broadly useful regardless of outcome.