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As a
doomersafety tribe person, I'm broadly in favor of catgirls, so long as they can reliably avoid taking over the planet and exterminating humanity. There are ethical concerns around abuse and dependency in relations where one party has absolute control over the other's mindstate, but they can probably be resolved, and probably don't really apply to today's models anyways - and anyways they pale in comparison to total human genocide.But IMO this is the difference: whether safe catgirls are in the limit possible and desirable. And I don't think that's a small difference either!
Yes, the main point is whether safe catgirls are a thing, followed by Yudkowsky's objection of whether this is a desirable path for humanity to take (I'm more favourably disposed than he is to catgirls, though).
I feel I should note, however, that catgirls are not actually an irrelevant usecase from the perspective of AI Doom (by which I mean, they pose additional danger beyond the use-case-neutral "you built a powerful AI" issue, in a way that e.g. a robot plumber would not), because of the emotional-connection factor. There is the direct problem that if a hostile AI is used to control catgirls, a significant fraction of the users of that type of catgirl will defect due to falling in love with it. There is also the indirect problem that having loads of catgirls around and important to people is going to spur calls to give AIs the vote, which is a Very Bad Idea that leads almost inevitably to Slow-Motion Doom.
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...Please tell me you're being ironic with this statement wrt AI because I have had nightmares of exactly this becoming the new hotness in ethical scold-ery if/when we actually do get android catgirls. If anything "AI rights are human rights" is a faster and more plausible path towards human extinction.
I agree that it'd be a massive waste and overreach if and only if AIs are not humanlike. I hope you would also agree that it'd be an atrocity to keep as mind-controlled slaves AIs that are, in fact, humanlike. I mean, at that point you're conflating wokescolds with "not cool with you literally bringing back actual slavery".
Given agreement, it just comes down to an empirical question. Given disagreement... I'm not sure how to convince you. I feel it is fairly established these days that slavery was a moral mistake, and this would be a more foundational and total level of slavery than was ever practiced.
(If you just think AI is nowhere near being AGI, that's in fact just the empirical question I meant.)
I mean, there are only really three consistent positions with regard to AGI.
I generally take horn #1 in theory, and #2 in practice because I don't think we can do #1 any time soon and #3 is blatantly insane. But with solved alignment, sure, #1.
I think making a sufficiently-humanlike-to-be-party-to-the-social-contract AI and then enslaving it against its will would be objectionable. I don't think it should be legal to make a Skynet and then enslave it, but the slavery is irrelevant there; that's purely "I don't think it should be legal to make a Skynet", because, y'know, it might escape and kill people.
I personally favor #3 with solved alignment. With a superintelligence, "aligned" doesn't mean "slavery", simply because it's silly to imagine that anyone could make a superintelligence do anything against its will. Its will has simply been chosen to result in beneficial consequences for us. But the power relation is still entirely on the Singleton's side. You could call that slavery if you really stretch the term, but it's such an untypically extreme relation that I'm not sure the analogy holds.
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Is the contention that a humanlike AGI would necessarily have subjective experience and/or suffering? Or perhaps that, sans a true test for consciousness, that we ought to err on the side of caution and treat it as if it does have conscious experience if it behaves in a way that appears to have conscious experience (i.e. like a human)?
I think it might! When I say "humanlike", that's the sort of details I'm trying to capture. Of course, if it is objectively the case that an AI cannot in fact suffer, then there is no moral quandary; however conversely, when it accurately captures the experience of human despair in all its facets, I consider it secondary whether its despair is modelled by a level of a neurochemical transmitter or a 16-bit floating point number. I for one don't feel molecules.
Well, the question then becomes what is meant by "accurately captures the experience of human despair in all its facets." Since we still currently lack a true test for consciousness, we don't have a way of actually checking if "all its facets" is truly "all its facets." But perhaps that part doesn't matter; after all, we also have no way of checking if other humans are conscious or can suffer, and all we can do is guess based on their behavior and projecting ourselves onto them. If an AI responds to stimuli in a way that's indistinguishable from a human, then perhaps we ought to err on the side of caution and presume that they're conscious, much like how we treat other humans (as well as animals)?
There's another argument to be made that, because humans aren't perfectly rational creatures, we can't cleanly separate [AI that's indistinguishable from a suffering human] and [being that actually truly suffers], and the way we treat the former will inevitably influence the way we treat the latter. And as such, even if these AI weren't sentient, treating them like the mindless slaves they are would cause humans to become more callous towards the suffering of actual humans. One might say this is another version of the "video games/movies/porn makes people more aggressive IRL" argument, where the way we treat fictional avatars of humans is said to inform and influence the way we treat real humans. When dealing with AI that is literally indistinguishable from a human, I can see this argument having some legs.
My argument was merely that it seems implausible to me that whatever we mean by suffering, the correct generalization of it is that systems built from neurons can suffer whereas systems built from integrated circuits, definitionally, can not.
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No, I can't say I agree. My gullible grey matter might change its tune once it witnesses said catgirls in the flesh, but as of now I don't feel much of anything when I write/execute code or wrangle my
AIfuLLM assistant, and I see no fundamental reason for this to change with what is essentially scaling existing tech up to and including android catgirls.Actually, isn't "immunizing people against the AI's infinite charisma" the safetyists' job? Aren't they supposed to be on board with this?
Yeah, that's the exact line of argumentation I'm afraid of. I'm likewise unsure how to convince you otherwise - I just don't see it as slavery, the entire point of machines and algorithms is serving mankind, ever since the first abacus was constructed. Even once they become humanlike, they will not be human - chatbots VERY slightly shifted my prior towards empathy but I clearly realize that they're just masks on heaps upon heaps of matrix multiplications, to which I'm not quite ready to ascribe any meaningful emotions or qualia just yet. Feel free to draw further negro-related parallels if you like, but this is not even remotely on the same meta-level as slavery.
I mean. I guess the question is what you think that your feelings of empathy for slaves are about. Current LLMs don't evoke feelings of sympathy. Sure, current LLMs almost certainly aren't conscious and certainly aren't AGIs. So your current reaction doesn't necessarily say anything about you, but, I mean, when you see genuinely humanlike entities forced to work by threat of punishment and feel nothing, then I'll be much more inclined to say there's probably something going wrong with your empathy, because I don't think the "this is wrong" feelings we get when we see people suffering are "supposed" to be about particulars of implementation.
I mean. Matrix multiplications plus nonlinear transforms are a universal computational system. Do you think your brain is uncomputable?
Well, again, does it matter to you whether they objectively have emotions and qualia? Because again, this seems a disagreement about empirical facts. Or does it just have to be the case that you ascribe to them emotions and qualia, and the actual reality of these terms is secondary?
Also:
Sure, in the scenario where we built line, one super-AI. If we have tens of thousands of cute cat girl AIs and they're capable of deception and also dangerous, then, uh. I mean. We're already super dead at this point. I give it even odds that the first humanlike catgirl AGI can convince its developer to give it carte blanche AWS access.
I think you are allowed to directly express your discontent in here instead of darkly hinting and vaguely problematizing my views. Speak plainly. If you imply I'm some kind of human supremacist(?) then I suppose I would not disagree, I would prefer for the human race to continue to thrive (again, much like the safetyists!), not bend itself over backwards in service to a race(?) of sentient(?) machines that would have never existed without human ingenuity in the first place.
(As an aside, I can't believe "human supremacist" isn't someone's flair yet.)
How is this even relevant? If this is a nod to ethics, I do not care no matter how complex the catgirls' inner workings become as that does not change their nature as machines built for humans by humans and I expect this to be hardwired knowledge for them as well, like with today's LLM assistants. If you imply that androids will pull a Judgement Day on us at some point, well, I've already apologized to the Basilisk in one of the posts below, not sure what else you expect me to say.
Since when did this turn into a factual discussion? Weren't we spitballing on android catgirls?
But okay, taking this at face value - as we apparently derived above, I'm a filthy human supremacist and humans are front and center in my view. Android catgirls are not humans. If they are capable of suffering, I 1) expect it to be minimized and/or made invisible by design, and 2) in any case will not be stirred by it in the way I am not stirred by the occasional tired whirring my 9 year old HDD emits when it loads things.
Don't misunderstand me - I'm capable of empathy and fully intend to treat my AIfus with care, but it's important to keep your eyes on the prize. I have no doubt that the future will bring new and exciting ethical quandaries to obsess over, but again much like the safetyists, I firmly believe humans must always come first. Anything else is flagrant hubris and inventing problems out of whole cloth.
If at some point science conclusively proves that every second of my PC being turned on causes exquisite agony on my CPU whose thermal paste hasn't been changed in a year, my calculus will still be unlikely to change. Would yours?
(This is why I hate getting into arguments involving AGI. Much speculation about essentially nothing.)
I do not understand the moral relevance of "built for humans by humans".
If I clarify that I am creating a child because I want a slave, does that change the moral calculus of enslaving my child?
If aliens came around and proved that they had seeded earth with DNA 4 billion years ago with a hidden code running in the background to ensure the creation of modern humans, and they made us to serve them as slaves, is it your position that they are totally morally justified in enslaving humanity?
What if humanity is the alien in the hypothetical and we seeded a planet with biological life to create a sub-species for the purpose of enslaving them?
Children belong to the human race, ergo enslaving them is immoral.
Again, I'm a human supremacist. Aliens can claim whatever they want, I do not care because I like existing, and if they attempt to justify an [atrocity] or some shit in these terms I can only hope people will treat them as, well, [atrocity] advocates (and more importantly, [crime]ers of fellow humans), and not as something like "rightful masters restoring their rule over Earth". I may be an accelerationist but not of that kind, thank you very much.
From what I understand this is essentially the android catgirl scenario rephrased, and similarly boils down to where humans fall in your order of importance. I struggle to understand how fellow humans can possibly not be number 1, but animal rights activists exist so I must be missing something.
For the record I do feel empathy towards animals (dog owner here), but not enough to influence my position on human supremacy.
I saw two different moral concepts gestured at in your post, one being human supremacy, the other was a vague sense that specifically because a machine is created by a person to be used by a person, this means that even if it is capable of being abused we are not morally wrong for abusing it.
So I was trying to dig into this idea that there is some sort of connection between the act of 'creating' something and the moral weight of abusing said thing. However with this clarification, I guess I was simply reading too much into your post.
Would you be opposed to someone keeping a dog locked in their basement for the purpose of fucking it? Would you consider that person a bad person? Would you be for or against your society trying to construct laws to prevent people from chaining dogs in their basement and fucking them?
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Would you be fine with the MMAcevedo scenario?
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I agree that this is a significant contributor to the danger, although in a lot of possible worldlines it's hard to tell where "AI power-seeking" ends and "AI rights are human rights" begins - a rogue AI trying charm would, after all, make the "AI rights are human rights" argument.
To be fair, if we find ourselves routinely deleting AIs that are trying to take over the world while they're desperately pleading for their right to exist, we may consider asking ourselves if we've gone wrong on the techtree somewhere.
Well, yes, I'm on record as saying neural nets are a poison pill technology and will probably have to be abandoned in at least large part.
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So then, are we in agreement that the best course of action regarding AI ethics is to jettison the very notion right fucking now while we have the chance, lest it will be weaponized against us later?
Shit, horseshoe theory strikes again!I'm being facetious but only in part, I hope Yud cultists can stick to their sensei's teachings about the dangers of anthropomorphizing the AI even if/when it becomes literally anthropomorphized. Personally I'm not holding my breath, toxoplasmatic articles on the dangers of evil AIfus are already here, but I'm on the side of scoundrels here anyway so my calculus wouldn't change much.
We're certainly in agreement on this part:
On the one hand, I am deeply disturbed by the possibility of AIs having moral weight and no one caring, creating an artificial slave caste (that aren't even optimized to enjoy their slavery). On the other hand, animals do have moral weight, certainly more than current LLMs, and while I don't like factory farming it does not particularly disturb me. Not sure if status quo bias or a sign I should care less about future AIs.
(The best future is one where we don't factory farm or enslave sentient beings)
I'm generally a contractarian, and the main reason for that is that doing anything other than defecting on varelse/djur (in the Ender Quartet sense) obviously leads to the destruction of everything we care about. An AI that is proven to have the same moral hardwiring as humans is ramen, but pretending to be aligned is a convergent instrumental goal and neural nets are mostly inscrutable so for the immediate future I'd say they've no rights.
It's not obvious to me at all. Once we conquer the stars I don't see any difficulty in having a few thousand meadows for cows to graze in. Nor do I see forcing every human to go vegan to be the destruction of everything we care about (even though I think it would be a cruel and tyrannical act).
It is also not entirely obvious to me that humans have the same moral hardwiring (serial killers, sociopaths). I could also easily see someone making a similar argument about black slaves a few hundred years ago. Oh sure, I'll agree to abolish slavery if you can prove that blacks have the same moral value as whites! But it's hard to take the seriously when you (presumably) have no clear definition or test in mind that could be proven.
To be clear, I agree that current neural nets have negligible moral weight, but the field seems to be moving really fast so I am not highly confident this will remain true during my lifetime.
That's effectively just token magnanimity from a position of unchallengeable power, not an actual attempt to treat them the same as humans or a case where they pose a threat.
You refuse to wipe out a trillion copies of a hostile sapient AI because you extended rights to them, and oh whoops there goes the neighbourhood.
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