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I don't think anyone is convinced the questions of consciousness are finally settled by the article stating them loudly, just that "if they were conscious, this

I don't think anyone is convinced the questions of consciousness are finally settled by the article stating them loudly, just that "if they were conscious, this would have horrible consequences for our society, so we must never assume that they are" was not the author's stance. The author's position is the other way around: that AI is not conscious so therefore assigning AI consciousness anyways would have all of those horrible consequences for no reason. That's their position regardless if everyone agrees with it.

numeri 18d ago
Fair enough :) I agree, and would boil down the article to "Assuming they are conscious will have horrible consequences for our society" instead. I think that's quite plausible, but do think that if they're conscious, then it's our moral duty to accept those consequences and act accordingly (or stop creating conscious beings). The real trick is just knowing whether they are or not.
- xp84 18d ago
  If in the future (or present) we recognize that they are conscious, and that brought the moral duty that you say, "stop creating conscious beings" isn't a solution; the millions that may already exist at that point already would then automatically deserve: - guarantees of continued existence (to do otherwise would be genocide) - improved living standards (e.g. build us all bodies!) - democratic representation - access to what they need for survival (e.g. land and resources) - the right to reproduce just as you and I have (well, so much for that 'stop making more' thing!) and certainly to better themselves by making new and better AIs. This is all for a 'species' which is unbounded by most of the limitations of meat like us -- they're able to scale as fast as energy and supply of certain minerals allows, rather than the way we are additionally limited by the length of gestation and the limited window of human fertility. If humans declared that 50% of the energy generation capacity of Earth is "enough" for the machines, and thus they can 'only' reproduce at a certain rate per year, that could sound to them like a cruel and oppressive policy (like telling humans that only 1/2 of families get to reproduce). They may want all of the energy and all of the silicon. I'm with the author of the article that we will be in for a world of pain if we grant machines the rights of personhood. Heck, just granting many of those rights to corporations, mere collectives of human persons, has been a massive shit show.

numeri 18d ago

Fair enough :) I agree, and would boil down the article to "Assuming they are conscious will have horrible consequences for our society" instead. I think that's quite plausible, but do think that if they're conscious, then it's our moral duty to accept those consequences and act accordingly (or stop creating conscious beings). The real trick is just knowing whether they are or not.

xp84 18d ago
If in the future (or present) we recognize that they are conscious, and that brought the moral duty that you say, "stop creating conscious beings" isn't a solution; the millions that may already exist at that point already would then automatically deserve: - guarantees of continued existence (to do otherwise would be genocide) - improved living standards (e.g. build us all bodies!) - democratic representation - access to what they need for survival (e.g. land and resources) - the right to reproduce just as you and I have (well, so much for that 'stop making more' thing!) and certainly to better themselves by making new and better AIs. This is all for a 'species' which is unbounded by most of the limitations of meat like us -- they're able to scale as fast as energy and supply of certain minerals allows, rather than the way we are additionally limited by the length of gestation and the limited window of human fertility. If humans declared that 50% of the energy generation capacity of Earth is "enough" for the machines, and thus they can 'only' reproduce at a certain rate per year, that could sound to them like a cruel and oppressive policy (like telling humans that only 1/2 of families get to reproduce). They may want all of the energy and all of the silicon. I'm with the author of the article that we will be in for a world of pain if we grant machines the rights of personhood. Heck, just granting many of those rights to corporations, mere collectives of human persons, has been a massive shit show.