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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   37485 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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Are we committing some crime against them? What if we think we've designed them to like it? It still seems all very I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.

I think there are a whole host of ethical questions about consciousness that don't (yet?) have good answers like the ones you ask. What is ethical for a consciousness that can be trivially duplicated or paused indefinitely? What level of intelligence merits protection?

You would think modern ethicists (or sci-fi authors) would be interested in these sorts of things, but I haven't seen much. They seem very focused on "alignment" or wrongthink, rather than the IMO hard questions. Open to, er, novel suggestions if anyone has discussed this more deeply that I've missed.

https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

The story covers explicitly emulated humans. I don't think that giving them rights would turn out to be particularly controversial IRL after teething pains.

It's when you consider the moral weight of subhuman, superhuman and outright alien intelligences (like GPT) that the headaches begin.

I don't think that giving them rights would turn out to be particularly controversial IRL

It would if there's a huge amount of money to be made by not giving them rights. Which is the point of mmacevedo.

It would take an exceptionally unlikely confluence of events for us to end up with a stable equilibrium where emulated humans are in any way, shape or form economically superior to nonhuman AGI for the same amount of compute.

Such a future is akin to worrying about flocks of birds being enslaved to drag heavy cargo along versus a 747, which is why Hanson's Age of Em is a poor work of futurism.

Humans ignore other humans' rights all the time. And there's a large number of people (a majority?) who don't even agree that any simulated mind can be real. Couple that with a profit motive, and widespread virtual slavery seems not just possible but likely.

The rights accorded to non-human intelligences, regardless of level, is of course even more fraught.

I would be willing to bet that that scenario falls under what I call teething pains.

I fully expect that in a a decade or two it'll become as non-controversial as say, IVF technology. Further, as I said in my other comment, it's quite implausible that human uploads will have any significant economic role to play versus dedicated AGI.

You would think modern ethicists (or sci-fi authors) would be interested in these sorts of things, but I haven't seen much.

I recall Black Mirror had a whole host of episodes about AI that's actually conscious and the ethical horrors that could follow. There was one about a game dev who made AI companions based on coworkers who slighted him, ruling over them cruelly within his own game simulation. It actually made a reference to I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream at one point. There was another about a conscious AI meant for controlling someone's home lighting and climate - and the AI was modeled after the user's consciousness, to best be able to know what the user wanted - which was essentially tortured into being a subservient tool by having it experience months of solitude simulated in seconds of real-life time.

This was after Black Mirror had gone severely downhill, though, so none of them really explored the ethics of it in an interesting way. It was mostly just "this bad; you feel horror."

You would think modern ethicists (or sci-fi authors) would be interested in these sorts of things, but I haven't seen much.

Of course not. These questions are fundamentally unsolvable at our current level of technology. Speculating would just put you in the position that Nozick and Searle are now once the next gen of AI gets out.

Is there a level of technology that would render these questions solvable?

I'm not aware of any device or software that could even move us closer to solving the hard problem of consciousness. (Maybe sufficient biological knowledge to construct a synthetic human fully from scratch would help somehow, but even some deity-AI that destroys our civilization won't be able to trivially do that...)

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