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The debate over whether AI will match or surpass human intelligence is often portrayed as an existential risk to Homo sapiens. A robot army rises up, Frankenstein-style, and turns against its creators. The autonomous AI systems that can someday quietly run government and company business assume that the world would run more easily if humans were cut out of the loop.
Now philosophers and AI researchers are wondering: Will these machines develop the power to bore or harm? In September, AI company Anthropic appointed an “AI welfare” researcher to, amongst other things, assess whether its systems are slowly moving toward consciousness or agency and, if that’s the case, whether their welfare must be taken under consideration. Last week, a world group of researchers published a report on the identical topic. They write that the pace of technological development “brings with it a practical possibility that some AI systems within the near future will likely be conscious and/or powerful and thus morally significant.”
The idea of fretting over AI's feelings seems far-fetched, nevertheless it reveals a paradox at the center of the good AI push: that firms are struggling to construct artificial systems which are smarter and more like us, while at the identical time fearing that Artificial systems have gotten too intelligent identical to us. Because we don’t fully understand how consciousness or a way of self arises within the human brain, we can’t be truly sure that it should never emerge in artificial brains. What seems remarkable, given the profound impact of the creation of digital “ghosts” on our own species, is that there isn’t any stronger external oversight of where these systems are evolving.
The report, titled “Taking AI Welfare Seriously,” was written by researchers at Eleos AI, a think tank dedicated to “the study of AI sentience and AI welfare,” together with authors including philosopher David Chalmers of the New York University, who argues that virtual worlds are real worlds, and Jonathan Birch, a tutorial on the London School of Economics, whose recent book, provides a framework for enthusiastic about animal and AI minds.
The report doesn’t claim that AI sentience (the power to feel sensations comparable to pain) or consciousness is feasible or imminent, only that “significant uncertainty exists about these possibilities.” They draw parallels to our historical ignorance of the moral status of nonhuman animals, which made factory farming possible; It wasn't until 2022 that crabs, lobsters and octopuses were protected under the UK's Animal Welfare Act with the assistance of Birch's work.
They warn that human intuition is a poor guide: our own species is at risk of each anthropomorphism, which attributes human characteristics to non-humans who don't have them, and anthropodenialism, which assigns human characteristics to non-humans who do have them , human characteristics denied .
The report recommends that firms take the problem of AI welfare seriously; that researchers find ways to review AI consciousness by following the lead of scientists who study non-human animals; and that policymakers are starting to contemplate the concept of sentient or conscious AI, even convening town hall meetings to review the problems.
These arguments have found some support in the normal research community. “I believe true artificial consciousness is unlikely, but not not possible,” says Anil Seth, professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience on the University of Sussex and renowned consciousness researcher. He believes that our self-awareness is linked to our biology and is greater than mere calculations.
But if he’s improper, which he admits, the implications might be immense: “Creating conscious AI could be an ethical disaster, as we’d have introduced latest forms of ethical subjects and potentially latest types of suffering into the world on an industrial scale.” .” Nobody, Seth adds, should try to construct such machines.
Awareness appears to be a more essential concern. In 2022, a Google engineer was fired after he said he believed the corporate's AI chatbot was showing signs of sentience. Anthropic has “character trained” its large language model to provide it characteristics comparable to thoughtfulness.
As machines in every single place, especially LLMs, are designed to be more human, we risk being deceived on a big scale by firms constrained by few checks and balances. We risk caring for machines that can’t reciprocate, diverting our limited moral resources from the relationships that matter. My flawed human intuition worries less in regards to the AI mind gaining the power to feel – and more in regards to the human mind losing the power to care.
