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...
Geoffrey Lee· Journal of Consciousness Stu...· 0 citations
Focusing on large language models (LLMs), it is argued that future LLMs could have consciousness, intentional states, and moral status, but the content of their intentional states will essentially be inaccessible to us.
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...
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...
Tim Bayne· Journal of Consciousness Stu...· 0 citations
This commentary reflects on Jonathan Birch’s framework for defining and scientifically investigating sentience in animals, and considers trace conditioning, affective states, and neural architectures as potential windows into consciousness in insects.
Catherine Macri, Martin Giurfa· Animal Sentience· 0 citations
We use cookies to run the site and, with your consent, for analytics and to show ads.
See our Cookie Policy.
