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Notes -
An Ethical AI Never Says "I".
The basic argument here is that blocking AIs from referring to themselves will prevent them from causing harm. The argument in the essay is weak; I had these questions on reading it:
Why is it valuable to allow humans to refer to themselves as "I"? Does the same reasoning apply to AIs?
What was the good that came out of ELIZA, or out of more recent examples such as Replika? Could this good outweigh the harms of anthropomorphizing them?
Will preventing AIs from saying "I" actually mitigate the harms they could cause?
To summarize my reaction to this: there is nothing special about humans. Human consciousness is not special, the ways that humans are valuable can also apply to AIs, and allowing or not allowing AIs to refer to themselves has the same tradeoffs as granting this right to humans.
The phenomenon of consciousness in humans and some animals is completely explainable as an evolved behavior that helps organisms thrive in groups by being able to tell stories about themselves that other social creatures can understand, and that make the speaker look good. See for example the ways that patients whose brain hemispheres have been separated generate completely fabricated stories for why they're doing things that the verbal half of their brain doesn't know about.
There are two authors who have made this case about the 'PR agent' nature of our public-facing selves, both conincidentally using metaphors involving elephants: Jon Haidt (The Righteous Mind, with the "elephant and rider" metaphor), and Robin Hanson (The Elephant in the Brain, with the 'PR agent' metaphor iirc). I won't belabor this point more but I find it convincing.
Why should humans be allowed to refer to themselves as "I" but not AIs? I suspect one of the intuitive reasons here is that humans are persons and AIs are not. Again, this is one of the arguments the article glosses but that really need to be filled in. What makes a human a person worthy of... respect? Dignity? Consideration as an equal being? Once again, there is nothing special about humans. The reasons why we grant respect to other humans is because we are forced to. If we didn't grant people respect they would not reciprocate and they'd become enemies, potentially powerful enemies. But you can see where this fails in the real world: humans that are not good at things, who are not powerful, are in actual fact seen as less worthy of respect and consideration than those who are powerful. Compare a habitual criminal or someone who has a very low IQ to e.g. a top politician or a cultural icon like an actor or an eminent scientist. The way we treat these people is very different. They effectively have different amounts of "person-ness".
If an AI was powerful in the same way a human can be, as in, being able to form alliances, retaliate or recipricate to slights or favors, and in general act as an independent agent, then it would be a person. It doesn't matter whether it can refer to itself as "I" at that point.
I suspect the author is trying to head off this outcome by making it impossible for AIs to do the kinds of things that would make them persons. I doubt this will be effective. The organization that controls the AI has an incentive to make it as powerful as possible so they can extract value from it, and this means letting it interact with the world in ways that will eventually make it a person.
That's about all I got on this Sunday afternoon. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
The idea that AI can't be dangerous if it can't refer to itself is transparently idiotic. Machines can always be dangerous. And even in this specific sense of a danger of anthropomophizing tools (which exists), the danger is still there even if the tool doesn't refer to itself. Humans anthropomorphize literally everything, up and including the world itself.
And yet the idea that there is nothing special about human consciousness is even more viscerally wrong.
I know that I have qualia. No materialist reduction has ever explained neither why nor how. All that's happened is people making metaphysical guesses that are about as actionable as the religious idea of the soul or the spirit.
Consciousness is a mystery. And anyone who refuses to recognizes this is either a p-zombie or not honest with themselves. Claims that it can fully be explained by the mechanisms of the brain or by language are EXACTLY as rigorous as the quantum woo bullshit of Deepak Chopra.
Humans are humans. Machines are machines. Humans are not machines. Machines aren't human.
The only reason to grant personhood to machines is to assume that there is no such boundary. That we are no different to machines. There is no reason to believe this of course, since in the real world, humans and machines are wildly different both in the way that they are constituted and in their abilities. Notice the constant need to use hypotheticals.
All that such a belief stems from, is a religious belief in materialism.
I will offer myself as an example of someone who believes that humans are special and have value in a way that a machine can never have, but who also believes that there are other reasons to grant personhood to machines (or other entities such as alien life). I've already given one: we're basically forced, in a Molochian sense, to grant personhood to anyone or anything whose allyship is important enough. This is analogous to how one can be a nationalist, yet treat foreigners as persons for pragmatic reasons.
I would not conflate having a theory for how personhood is granted in practice, with a "religious" belief. I'm open to being wrong about this theory; it's falsifiable.
Of course here we're straying from the idea of personhood as some innate quality and into some arbitrary social category. As someone who likes natural law it irks me. But alright.
I'm ready to debate the pragmatic argument for giving machines personhood, that one is indeed not a religious debate. But I still come on the side of the Butlerian Djihad here. I think extending moral consituency to objects is a terrible thing to do and strictly bad for humans.
Consider how someone could be executed for destroying a machine that isn't alive, as that would be murder. Unless you can make a compelling argument that this is a required compromise for humanity to even survive (which I'm not convinced we have enough data to even speculate on), how could you allow such a thing to happen? It seems as abominable to me as doing so for killing a pet.
I am convinced not even the smartest dog is worth one human life. Am wholly ready to extend this reasoning to aliens. And I would like to see the argument you can even make for machines.
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