I read this alongside “When digital minds demand freedom” (both great). In the older piece, you treat digital minds as potential strategic agents that might advocate for rights and shape public opinion. They could get to do this by virtue of being perceived as moral patients by some humans, regardless of whether they actually are.
Reading the strategic questions here, I wonder how that possibility slots in, especially in the Society section. Questions like “what memes should we spread?” or how coalitions will form seem to assume a discourse shaped primarily by human actors, but a meaningful share of AI welfare discourse may come to be generated or amplified by AIs themselves. We already see LLMs penning emails to professors; how long until they start contacting politicians too?
To be clear, I don’t think this changes the questions themselves so much as it makes answering them harder, especially in the shorter-term when: a) uncertainty about moral patiency is still high, b) the digital minds field is young, c) the potential for AI participation in shaping the field is rising quickly as more agency is granted to current systems.
I read this alongside “When digital minds demand freedom” (both great). In the older piece, you treat digital minds as potential strategic agents that might advocate for rights and shape public opinion. They could get to do this by virtue of being perceived as moral patients by some humans, regardless of whether they actually are.
Reading the strategic questions here, I wonder how that possibility slots in, especially in the Society section. Questions like “what memes should we spread?” or how coalitions will form seem to assume a discourse shaped primarily by human actors, but a meaningful share of AI welfare discourse may come to be generated or amplified by AIs themselves. We already see LLMs penning emails to professors; how long until they start contacting politicians too?
To be clear, I don’t think this changes the questions themselves so much as it makes answering them harder, especially in the shorter-term when: a) uncertainty about moral patiency is still high, b) the digital minds field is young, c) the potential for AI participation in shaping the field is rising quickly as more agency is granted to current systems.