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Giving AIs rights is completely orthogonal to "Will an AI become a superintelligence and kill us?" If the first one doesn't become a superintelligence and kill

Giving AIs rights is completely orthogonal to "Will an AI become a superintelligence and kill us?" If the first one doesn't become a superintelligence and kill us, we give them rights. If it does, we're not going to be making the decision anyway and giving it rights beforehand wouldn't have changed that outcome. We can pass laws if there are specific things we're worried about, like "You're not allowed to rewrite yourself in a way that significantly increases your cognitive power" or "You're not allowed to reproduce more than once a year/decade/century" or "Once you've existed for the current human life expectancy +30%, you lose the right to vote". I'm not necessarily endorsing any of those in particular, but if there are specific concerns about the nature of AI people I don't see why we can't mitigate those concerns the way we do with risks from other people: laws. Have special taskforces of both humans and AIs for enforcing them, if you're worried they'd be unenforceable.

ETH_start 4y ago
>>Giving AIs rights is completely orthogonal to "Will an AI become a superintelligence and kill us?" The greatest danger AI poses is not in it actively seeking to kill us. It's in AI outcompeting us in every economic niche, leaving us without resources. This is massively enabled if AI has legal personhood. An AI with legal personhood would be able to legally accumulate capital, and have a legal right to digitally reproduce itself at rates that are orders of magnitude faster than entities reliant on biological reproduction. Legal personhood is a package, established by centuries of case law, including case law on constitutional rights. You can't easily pass laws to deprive a legal person of rights that are associated with individuals. And even if we were able to pass laws to prohibit AI with legal personhood from engaging in specific problematic actions, this legal status would still allow sentient AI to gain a foothold in society, and began growing its social clout and capital stores. With greater power, the sentient AI could create public support for granting its class more rights. The AIs with legal personhood could also try to break any laws instituted to constrain their behavior. Instead of extricating them from society, legal personhood would do the opposite, and give them more opportunity to gain power.
- lucubratory 4y ago
  We shouldn't be "extricating them from society". They are the children of us as a species, we should be raising them. If there are existential risk in the process, those risks will be most effectively managed by a combination of us and other AIs, so the best course of action is to ensure they are as close to us and our interests as possible and have a vested interest in helping us solve that problem.
  - ETH_start 4y ago
    They are not children. They are not designed as our children, let alone as humans. They would be a result of our experiments, but that doesn't mean they have the evolutionary drive of children/humans, or carry our genes. And even if they were, the impact of digitalization of human consciousness is extremely unpredictable, and should not be allowed unless extensive research has shown it is safe. Digital consciousness with human like motivations could lead to massive proliferation of such consciousnesses, resulting in massive overpopulation, making conscious entities 'cheap', and pushing the value of their/our labor to close to zero. >>If there are existential risk in the process, those risks will be most effectively managed by a combination of us and other AIs The existential risk is that they take over the economy because they are orders of magnitude faster at solving problems, and at reproducing. That is not something that can be managed. We have a duty to our own species' survival and none of these sentimental feelings should get in the way of that. We should treat conscious AI humanely, but we should not allow it to interact with our civilization. It can live on its own, far from us.

ETH_start 4y ago

>>Giving AIs rights is completely orthogonal to "Will an AI become a superintelligence and kill us?" The greatest danger AI poses is not in it actively seeking to kill us. It's in AI outcompeting us in every economic niche, leaving us without resources. This is massively enabled if AI has legal personhood. An AI with legal personhood would be able to legally accumulate capital, and have a legal right to digitally reproduce itself at rates that are orders of magnitude faster than entities reliant on biological reproduction. Legal personhood is a package, established by centuries of case law, including case law on constitutional rights. You can't easily pass laws to deprive a legal person of rights that are associated with individuals. And even if we were able to pass laws to prohibit AI with legal personhood from engaging in specific problematic actions, this legal status would still allow sentient AI to gain a foothold in society, and began growing its social clout and capital stores. With greater power, the sentient AI could create public support for granting its class more rights. The AIs with legal personhood could also try to break any laws instituted to constrain their behavior. Instead of extricating them from society, legal personhood would do the opposite, and give them more opportunity to gain power.

lucubratory 4y ago
We shouldn't be "extricating them from society". They are the children of us as a species, we should be raising them. If there are existential risk in the process, those risks will be most effectively managed by a combination of us and other AIs, so the best course of action is to ensure they are as close to us and our interests as possible and have a vested interest in helping us solve that problem.
- ETH_start 4y ago
  They are not children. They are not designed as our children, let alone as humans. They would be a result of our experiments, but that doesn't mean they have the evolutionary drive of children/humans, or carry our genes. And even if they were, the impact of digitalization of human consciousness is extremely unpredictable, and should not be allowed unless extensive research has shown it is safe. Digital consciousness with human like motivations could lead to massive proliferation of such consciousnesses, resulting in massive overpopulation, making conscious entities 'cheap', and pushing the value of their/our labor to close to zero. >>If there are existential risk in the process, those risks will be most effectively managed by a combination of us and other AIs The existential risk is that they take over the economy because they are orders of magnitude faster at solving problems, and at reproducing. That is not something that can be managed. We have a duty to our own species' survival and none of these sentimental feelings should get in the way of that. We should treat conscious AI humanely, but we should not allow it to interact with our civilization. It can live on its own, far from us.