Lawyering for long-term unimpeachable human progress.
Panashe Zowa
Karma: 25
The Messy Politics of AI Moral Patienthood
The epoch of superintelligence will not result in any meaningful improvements in animal welfare. Previous epochs of humanity, marked by transformative advancements such as the industrial and digital revolutions, have failed to yield meaningful improvements in animal welfare. If anything, these shifts created novel pathways for animal exploitation or rendered existing models, such as animal husbandry, vastly more lethal and efficient through the rise and continued development of factory farming. Unless there is a massive societal-level dietary shift, which I think is unlikely or a fundamental change in how society views animal bodies as exploitable resources free for the taking, AGI will likely follow this historical precedent. Like other transformative technologies before it, AGI will be leveraged to further optimise efficiency and, by extension, the lethality of existing egregious practices.
Hi, there! I completely understand your concerns. I have had to grapple with many of them over the years. Don’t feel discouraged, many of these issues are still subject to debate within the wider EA community.
I am a Zimbabwean who lives and works in Nigeria and South Africa at present. I would like to provide my insights on whether proximity matters. Like all effective altruists, I fundamentally desire to flip the notion that charity begins at home on its head in line with Singerian approaches to ethics and philanthropy. I seek to go where I can help the most.
At this stage however, I believe in focusing on primarily addressing African problems due to my own local expertise and the sheer scale of the developmental challenges in the African context. Some of my critical priorities include reducing poverty, improving healthcare outcomes and enhancing access to quality education.
Hi Nick. Thanks for engaging with the post and for your thoughtful comments. They gave me a lot to think about. This is my third draft, which I hope is shorter than the other two.
I think you are right that in the near term, even if there is significant scientific progress in settling questions about AI consciousness and moral patienthood, people will only consider the welfare of AI once they feel that their own welfare and future, and those of their families and communities, are safe and secure from AI.
What I left out of this piece, and hope to cover in a follow-up, is that the question need not be zero-sum. I can imagine a situation in which AI welfare does not conflict with AI safety but instead bolsters cooperation between humans and AI systems. Granting legal personhood and certain property rights, for instance, would give AI systems a shared stake in our legal and political order, which is the argument Salib and Goldstein advance in their work on AI rights for human safety. In such a world, AI welfare would complement AI safety in a manner that supports human flourishing rather than impeding it.
In addition, I do think that the existence of what appears to be a bipartisan consensus on ‘No rights for AIs’ in the US at present does not necessarily imply that the underlying politics are not messy. Politicians who hold different ideological viewpoints will arrive at the shared consensus of ‘No rights for AIs’ from different starting points, and it would still be prudent to identify some of the intricacies shaping how they view this issue in order to determine what can move them and ensure some shift in their attitude that results in some welfare improvements.