AIs could have negligible welfare (in expectation) even if they are conscious. They may not be sentient even if they are conscious, or have negligible welfare even if they are sentient. I would say the (expected) total welfare of a group (individual welfare times population) matters much more for its moral consideration than the probability of consciousness of its individuals. Do you have any plans to compare the individual (expected hedonistic) welfare of AIs, animals, and humans? You do not mention this in the section “What’s next”.
This is an important caveat. While our motivation for looking at consciousness is largely from its relation to moral status, we don’t think that establishing that AIs were conscious would entail that they have significant states that counted strongly one way or the other for our treatment of them, and establishing that they weren’t conscious wouldn’t entail that we should feel free to treat them however we like.
We think that it estimates of consciousness still play an important practical role. Work on AI consciousness may help us to achieve consensus on reasonable precautionary measures and motivate future research directions with a more direct upshot. I don’t think the results of this model can be directly plugged into any kind of BOTEC, and should be treated with care.
Do you have any ideas for how to decide on the priors for the probability of sentience? I agree decisions about priors are often very arbitrary, and I worry they will have significantly different implications.
We favored a 1⁄6 prior for consciousness relative to every stance and we chose that fairly early in the process. To some extent, you can check the prior against what you update to on the basis of your evidence. Given an assignment of evidence strength and an opinion about what it should say about something that satisfies all of the indicators, you can backwards infer the prior needed to update to the right posterior. That prior is basically implicit in your choices about evidential strength. We didn’t explicitly set our prior this way, but we would probably have reconsidered our choice of 1⁄6 if it was giving really implausible results for humans, chickens, and ELIZA across the board.
The right conclusion would be that the respondants have no idea about the right exponent, or how to weight the various models because they would not be able to adequately justify their picks.
There is a tension here between producing probabilities we think are right and producing probabilities which could reasonably act as a consensus conclusion. I have my own favorite stance, and I think I have good reason for it, but I didn’t try to convince anyone to give it more weight in our aggregation. Insofar as we’re aiming in the direction of something that could achieve broad agreement, we don’t want to give too much weight to our own views (even if we think we’re right). Unfortunately,among people with significant expertise in this area, there is broad and fairly fundamental disagreement. We think that it is still valuable to shoot for consensus, even if that means everyone will think it is flawed (by giving too much weight to different stances.)
This is an important caveat. While our motivation for looking at consciousness is largely from its relation to moral status, we don’t think that establishing that AIs were conscious would entail that they have significant states that counted strongly one way or the other for our treatment of them, and establishing that they weren’t conscious wouldn’t entail that we should feel free to treat them however we like.
We think that it estimates of consciousness still play an important practical role. Work on AI consciousness may help us to achieve consensus on reasonable precautionary measures and motivate future research directions with a more direct upshot. I don’t think the results of this model can be directly plugged into any kind of BOTEC, and should be treated with care.
We favored a 1⁄6 prior for consciousness relative to every stance and we chose that fairly early in the process. To some extent, you can check the prior against what you update to on the basis of your evidence. Given an assignment of evidence strength and an opinion about what it should say about something that satisfies all of the indicators, you can backwards infer the prior needed to update to the right posterior. That prior is basically implicit in your choices about evidential strength. We didn’t explicitly set our prior this way, but we would probably have reconsidered our choice of 1⁄6 if it was giving really implausible results for humans, chickens, and ELIZA across the board.
There is a tension here between producing probabilities we think are right and producing probabilities which could reasonably act as a consensus conclusion. I have my own favorite stance, and I think I have good reason for it, but I didn’t try to convince anyone to give it more weight in our aggregation. Insofar as we’re aiming in the direction of something that could achieve broad agreement, we don’t want to give too much weight to our own views (even if we think we’re right). Unfortunately,among people with significant expertise in this area, there is broad and fairly fundamental disagreement. We think that it is still valuable to shoot for consensus, even if that means everyone will think it is flawed (by giving too much weight to different stances.)