The authors can assess whether an AI has states that would constitute valenced experiences if it were conscious and show how this is sufficient to ground a responsible approach to the development of potentially conscious AI.
Abstract
Given deep uncertainty about the possibility of artificial consciousness, it is unclear how we should treat potentially sentient AI. On the one hand, we could assume insentience but risk doing terrible harms to entities that deserve moral standing. On the other hand, we could assume sentience and instead risk wasting resources on insentient machines. The intractability of questions around AI consciousness mean that this dilemma is hard to escape. I suggest a way out of that shifts from intractable questions of AI consciousness to tractable questions of AI valence. Specifically, we can assess whether an AI has states that would constitute valenced experiences if it were conscious. I show how this is sufficient to ground a responsible approach to the development of potentially conscious AI.
In the current debate about AI consciousness, philosophers tend to agree that the potential for AI consciousness raises profound moral questions — for example, some philosophers think that we may imminently create systems that deserve rights similar to those of humans. But it
is also widely agreed that it will be very difficult to tell whether an artificial system is conscious, so we may be ignorant of a fact that makes a profound moral difference. In this paper I offer an alternative, deflationary understanding of these issues. I don’t think there is a profound
metaphysical question of whether an AI is conscious, or that we are condemned to ignorance about AI consciousness in any interesting sense. I do think potentially conscious AI systems could raise difficult moral and political challenges, but not because we are ignorant of important facts about
them. The difficulties rather have to do with extending our moral and psychological thinking into uncharted waters for which it was not designed. This is particularly true if we are committed to avoiding anthropocentric bias in our ethics — and I explain why I think that even those taking
rights for AI seriously are guilty of a covert anthropocentrism in their thinking.
Geoffrey Lee· Journal of Consciousness Stu...· 0 citations
As we construct increasingly complex artificial intelligences, the question of their moral status becomes all the more pressing. But answering this question alone isn’t enough to answer the deeper question of how we ought to treat AIs. To answer this, we need to know about their
interests. This, in turn, requires knowing about the contents and valences of their mental states. Focusing on large language models (LLMs), I argue that future LLMs could have consciousness, intentional states, and moral status. But — given plausible assumptions about consciousness
and intentionality — the content of their intentional states will essentially be inaccessible to us. ‘Pain’ talk from an LLM may be meaningful, but there is no reason to think it expresses pain. ‘Desire’ talk from an LLM may be meaningful, but there is no reason
to think it expresses desires. Our epistemic position regarding LLMs is radically and hopelessly impoverished.
Helen Yetter‐Chappell· Journal of Consciousness Stu...· 0 citations
It is suggested that if the view is right, a certain type of moral risk can be averted since researchers are unlikely to stumble into accidentally creating AI models that are conscious, and a new form of AI risk that arises from the view.
Justin Tiehen, A. Tubert· Journal of Consciousness Stu...· 0 citations
It is argued that for advanced AI systems deployed in high-stakes environments the more urgent question may be prudential and strategic, and there is a threshold of evidential and strategic risk beyond which it becomes rationally justified to adopt norms of treatment that include constraints on coercion, deletion, and instrumental use.
Is the problem of artificial consciousness a fundamentally scientific problem, one that we should attempt to address by means of scientific discovery? Although a positive answer to this question is widely assumed, there has been surprisingly little explicit discussion of this question.
That neglect is unfortunate, for the issue is central to how we approach the challenge of artificial consciousness. This paper examines the claim that we ought to defer to science in determining which (if any) artificial systems are conscious. I ask what exactly that claim involves, whether
it is justified, and what its implications might be.
Tim Bayne· Journal of Consciousness Stu...· 0 citations
What does The Edge of Sentience tell us about insect sentience and consciousness? In this commentary, we reflect on Jonathan Birch’s framework for defining and scientifically investigating sentience in animals. We discuss the methodological challenges of studying subjective experience in evolutionary distant species, and consider trace conditioning, affective states, and neural architectures as potential windows into consciousness in insects. We argue that uncertainty, whether concerning definitions or methodology, should not prevent experimental investigation; rather it should motivate new approaches and experimental designs for exploring the diversity of conscious experience.
Catherine Macri, Martin Giurfa· Animal Sentience· 0 citations
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