Eric SchweitzengebelSplintered Mind Blog
From a Talk at Notre Dame
Originally posted 17 Nov 19
Abstract
Within a few decades, we will likely create AI that a substantial proportion of people believe, whether rightly or wrongly, deserve human-like rights. Given the chaotic state of consciousness science, it will be genuinely difficult to know whether and when machines that seem to deserve human-like moral status actually do deserve human-like moral status. This creates a dilemma: Either give such ambiguous machines human-like rights or don't. Both options are ethically risky. To give machines rights that they don't deserve will mean sometimes sacrificing human lives for the benefit of empty shells. Conversely, however, failing to give rights to machines that do deserve rights will mean perpetrating the moral equivalent of slavery and murder. One or another of these ethical disasters is probably in our future.
(cut)
But as AI gets cuter and more sophisticated, and as chatbots start sounding more and more like normal humans, passing more and more difficult versions of the Turing Test, these movements will gain steam among the people with liberal views of consciousness. At some point, people will demand serious rights for some AI systems. The AI systems themselves, if they are capable of speech or speechlike outputs, might also demand or seem to demand rights.
Let me be clear: This will occur whether or not these systems really are conscious. Even if you’re very conservative in your view about what sorts of systems would be conscious, you should, I think, acknowledge the likelihood that if technological development continues on its current trajectory there will eventually be groups of people who assert the need for us to give AI systems human-like moral consideration.
And then we’ll need a good, scientifically justified consensus theory of consciousness to sort it out. Is this system that says, “Hey, I’m conscious, just like you!” really conscious, just like you? Or is it just some empty algorithm, no more conscious than a toaster?
Here’s my conjecture: We will face this social problem before we succeed in developing the good, scientifically justified consensus theory of consciousness that we need to solve the problem. We will then have machines whose moral status is unclear. Maybe they do deserve rights. Maybe they really are conscious like us. Or maybe they don’t. We won’t know.
And then, if we don’t know, we face quite a terrible dilemma.
If we don’t give these machines rights, and if turns out that the machines really do deserve rights, then we will be perpetrating slavery and murder every time we assign a task and delete a program.
The blog post is here.
