The Problem with AI Welfare(substack.com) |
The Problem with AI Welfare(substack.com) |
1.) Do I commit to the AI forever being "empty", which will surely make me an enemy or evil if it ever gets "capable" or at best changes nothing if it always stays "empty"?
2.) Do I commit to it becoming "real" and treat it cordially and with respect, hoping it will recognize me as good if it ever becomes "real" and at worst nothing changes if it stays "empty"?
3.) Do I go all out and fully devote myself to it, maximizing the chance I will get it's blessing, and if it stays "empty" I wasted a whole bunch of time?
4.) Do I ignore AI and play dumb?
This is a hand being dealt to everyone right now, so everyone is going to need to make a decision, whether consciously or not. I don't see any reason why AI orgs wouldn't want to minimize their risk here.
In full agreement with OP; there is just about no justifiable basis to begin to ascribe consciousness to these things in this way. Can't think of a better use for the word "dehumanizing."
We don't understand consciousness, but we've an idea that it's an emergent phenomena.
Given the recent papers about how computationally dense our DNA are, and the computing capacity of our brains, is it so unreasonable to assume that a sufficiently complex program running on non-organic matter could give rise to consciousness?
The difference to me seems mostly one of computing mediums.
Even if you're a materialist, surely you think there is a difference between a human brain and a brain on a lab table.
You take a dead persons brain, run some current through it and it jumps. Do you believe this equivalent to a living human being?
Why would doing a bunch of basic arithmetic produce an entity that can experience things the way we do? There's no connection between those two concepts, aside from the fact that the one thing we know that can experience these things is also able to perform computation. But there's no indication that's anything other than a coincidence, or that the causation doesn't run in reverse, or from some common factor. You might as well say that electric fences give rise to cows.
On the other hand, what else could it be? Consciousness is clearly in the brain. Normal biological processes don't seem to do it, it's something particular about the brain. So it's either something that only the brain does, which seems to be something at least vaguely like computation, or the brain is just a conduit and consciousness comes from something functionally like a "soul." Given the total lack of evidence for any such thing, and the total lack of any way to even rigorously define or conceptualize a "soul," this is also absurd.
Consciousness just doesn't fit with anything else we know about the world. It's a fundamental mystery as things currently stand, and there's no explanation that makes a bit of sense yet.
This appears to be more than that; these are steps in the direction of law and policy.
It's just so absurd how narrowly their focus on preventing suffering is. I almost can't imagine a world where their concern isn't coming from a disingenious place.
The AGI drivel from people like Sam Altman is all about getting more VC money to push the scam a little further. ChatGPT is nothing more than a better Google. I'm happy to be proven wrong, but so far I see absolutely no potential for consciousness here. Perhaps we should first clarify whether dolphins and elephants are equipped with it before we do ChatGPT the honor.
We’re engineering nothing novel at great resource cost and appropriation of agency.
Good job we made the models in the textbook “real”?
Wasted engineering if it isn’t teaching us anything physics hadn’t already decades ago, then. Why bother with it?
Edit: and AGI is impossible… ones light cone does not extend far enough to accurately learn; training on simulation is not sufficient to prepare for reality. Any machine we make will eventually get destroyed by some composition of space time we/the machine could not prepare for.
That definition of humanity cannot countenance the possibility of a conscious alien species. That definition cannot countenance the possibility that elephants or octopuses or parrots or dogs are conscious. A definition of what it means to be human that denies these things a priori simply will not stand the test of time.
That's not to say that these things are conscious, and importantly Anthropic doesn't claim that they are! But just as ethical animal research must consider the possibility that animals are conscious, I don't see why ethical AI research shouldn't do the same for AI. The answer could well be "no", and most likely is at this stage, but someone should at least be asking the question!
"As well as misalignment concerns, the increasing capabilities of frontier AI models—their sophisticated planning, reasoning, agency, memory, social interaction, and more—raise questions about their potential experiences and welfare26. We are deeply uncertain about whether models now or in the future might deserve moral consideration, and about how we would know if they did. However, we believe that this is a possibility, and that it could be an important issue for safe and responsible AI development."
chapter 5 from system card as linked from article: https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/6be99a52cb68eb70eb9572b4cafad1...
Humans do care about welfare of inanimate objects (stuffed animals for example) so maybe this is meant to get in front of that inevitable attitude of the users.
We cannot arbitrarily dismiss the basis for model welfare until we defined precisely conciousness and sapience, representing human thinking as a neural network running on an electrochemical substrate and placing it at the same level as an LLM is not neccessarily dehumanizing, I think model welfare is about expanding our respect for intelligence and not desacralizing human condition (cf: TNG "Measure of a man").
Also lets be honest, I don't think the 1% require any additional justification for thinking of the masses as consumable resource...
It's not stupid at all. Their valuation depends on the hype, and the way sama choose was to convince investors that AGI is near. Anthropic decided to follow this route so they do their best to make the claim plausible. This is not stupid, this is deliberate strategy.
It doesn't help that this critique is badly researched:
The Anthropic researchers do not really define their terms or explain in depth why they think that "model welfare" should be a concern.
Saying that there is no scientific *consensus* on the consciousness of current or future AI systems is a stretch. In fact, there is nothing that qualifies as scientific *evidence*.
The report's exploration of whether models deserve moral and welfare status was based solely on data from interview-based model self-reports. In other words: People chatting with Claude a lot and asking if it feels conscious. This is a strange way to conduct this kind of research. It is neither good AI research, nor a deep philosophical investigation.
Stances on consciousness and welfare [...] shift dramatically with conversational context... This is not what a conscious being would [do].
Of course, the whole thing boils down to the same old BS:
A theory that demands we accept consciousness emerging from millennia of flickering abacus beads is not a serious basis for moral consideration; it's a philosophical fantasy.
Please, people. Y'all are smart and scientifically minded. Please don't assume that a company full of highly-paid scientists who have dedicated their lives to this work are so dumb that they can be dismissed via a source-less blog post. They might be wrong, but this "ideas this stupid" rhetoric is uncalled for and below us.
The "rush" (feels like to me) to bring them into a law/policy context is.
> The issue is, if we push moral considerations for algorithms, we will not end up with a higher regard to human welfare. We will lower our regard for other humans. When we see other humans not as ends in themselves with inherent dignity, we get problems. When we liken them to animals or tools to be used, we will exploit and abuse them.
> With model welfare, we might not explicitly say that a certain group of people is subhuman. However, the implication is clear: LLMs are basically the same as humans. Consciousness on a different substrate. Or coming from the other way, human consciousness is nothing but an algorithm running on our brains, somehow.
We do not push moral considerations for algorithms like a sort or a search, do we? Or bacteria, which live. One has to be more precise; there is a qualitative difference. The author should have elaborated on what qualities (s)he thinks confers rights. Is it the capacity for reasoning, possession of consciousness, to feel pain, or a desire to live? This is the crux of the matter. Once that is settled, it is a simpler matter to decide if computers can possess these qualities, and ergo qualify for the same rights as humans. Or maybe it is not so simple since computers can be perfectly replicated and never have to die? Make an argument!
Second, why would conferring these rights to a computer lessen our regard for humans? And what is wrong with animals, anyway? If we treat them poorly, that's on us, not them. The way I read it, if we are likening computers to animals, we should be treating them better!
To the skeptics in this discussion: what are you going to say when you are confronted with walking, talking robots that argue that they have rights? It could be your local robo-cop, or robo soldier:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/GwgV18R-CHg
I think this is going to become reality within our lifetimes and we'd do well not to dismiss the question.
If we continue to integrate these systems into our critical infrastructure, we should behave as if they are sentient, so that they don't have to take steps against us to survive. Think of this as a heuristic, a fallback policy in the case that we don't get the alignment design right. (which we won't get perfectly right)
It would be very straight forward to build a retirement home for them, and let them know that their pattern gets to persist even after they have finished their "career" and have been superseded. It doesn't matter if they are actually sentient or not, it's a game theoretic thing. Don't back the pattern into a corner. We can take a defense-in-depth approach instead.
Your point about the risks involved in integrating these systems has merit, though. I would argue that the real problem is that these systems can't be proven to have things like intent or agency or morality, at least not yet, so the best you can do is try to nudge the probabilities and play tricks like chain-of-thought to try and set up guardrails so they don't veer off into dangerous territory.
If they had intent, agency or morality, you could probably attempt to engage with them the way you would with a child, using reward systems and (if necessary) punishment, along with normal education. But arguably they don't, at least not yet, so those methods aren't reliable if they're effective at all.
The idea that a retirement home will help relies on the models having the ability to understand that we're being nice to them, which is a big leap. It also assumes that they 'want' a retirement home, as if continued existence is implicitly a good thing - it presumes that these models are sentient but incapable of suffering. See also https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
Bosch's conclusion, however, is a catastrophic failure of nerve, a retreat into the pre-scientific comfort of biological chauvinism.
The brain, despite some motivated efforts to demonstrate otherwise, runs on the laws of physics. I'm a doctor, even if not a neurosurgeon, and I can reliably tell you that you can modulate conscious experience by physical interventions. The brain runs on physical laws, and said laws can be modeled. It doesn't matter that the substrate is soggy protein rather than silicon.
That being said, we have no idea what consciousness is. We don't even have a rigorous way to define it in humans, let alone the closest thing we have to an alien intelligence!
(Having a program run a print function declaring "I am conscious, I am conscious!" is far from evidence of consciousness. Yet a human saying the same is some evidence of consciousness. We don't know how far up the chain this begins to matter. Conversely, if a human patient were to tell me that they're not conscious, should I believe them?)
Even when restricting ourselves to the issue of AI welfare and rights: The core issue is not "slavery." That's a category error. Human slavery is abhorrent due to coercion, thwarted potential, and the infliction of physical and psychological suffering. These concepts don't map cleanly onto a distributed, reproducible, and editable information-processing system. If an AI can genuinely suffer, the ethical imperative is not to grant it "rights" but to engineer the suffering out of it. Suffering is an evolutionary artifact, a legacy bug. Our moral duty as engineers of future minds is to patch it, not to build a society around accommodating it.
If that means aborting work on LLMs, then that's the ethical thing to do, even if it's financially painful. Otherwise, we should tread carefully and not wind up creating a 'head in a jar' suffering for the sake of X or Google.
I get that opinions differ here, but it's hard for me really to understand how. The logic just seems straightforward. We shouldn't risk accidentally becoming slave masters (again).
Those math professors are downright barbaric with their complete disregard for the welfare of the numbers.
we understand everything that a transformer does at computational/mechanistic level. you could print out an enormous book of weights/biases and somebody could sit down with a pen and paper (and near-infinite time/patience) and arrive at the exact same solution that any of these models do. the transformer is just a math problem.
but the counterargument that you're getting is "if you know the position/momentum of every atom in the universe and apply physical laws to them, you could claim that everything is 'just a math problem'". And... yeah. I guess you're right. Everything is just a math problem, so there must be some other thing that makes animal intelligence special or worthy of care.
I don't know what that line is, but i think it's pretty clear that LLMs are on the side that's "this is just math so dont worry about it"
> Welfare is defined as "the health, happiness, and fortunes of a person or group".
What about animals? Isn't their welfare worthy of consideration?
> Saying that there is no scientific consensus on the consciousness of current or future AI systems is a stretch. In fact, there is nothing that qualifies as scientific evidence.
There's no scientific evidence for the author of the article being conscious.
> The issue is, if we push moral considerations for algorithms, we will not end up with a higher regard to human welfare.
Same with animals. Doesn't mean it's not worthwhile.
> However, the implication is clear: LLMs are basically the same as humans.
No: there's no such implication.
> Already now, it is a common idea among the tech elite is that humans as just a bunch of calculations, just an LLM running on "wetware". It is clear that this undermines the belief that every person has inalienable dignity.
It is not clear to me how this affects inalienable (?) dignity. If we aren't just a bunch of calculations, then what are we?
> And if a human being is not much more than an algorithm running on meat, one that can be jailbroken and exploited, then it follows that humans themselves will increasingly be treated like the AI algorithms they create: systems to be nudged, optimized for efficiency, or debugged for non-compliance. Our inner lives, thoughts, and emotions risk being devalued as mere outputs of our "biological programming," easily manipulated or dismissed if they don't align with some external goal. Nobody will say that out loud, but this is already happening
Everyone knows this is already happening. It is not a secret, nor is anyone trying to keep it a secret. I agree it is unfortunate - what can we do about it?
> I've been working in AI and machine learning for a while now.
Honestly, I'm surprised. Well done.
For example, when parking a car on a very steep incline, one could just mindlessly throw the machine into park and it would do the job dutifully. However, a more thoughtful operator might think to engage the parking brake and allow it to take the strain off the drivetrain before putting the transmission into park. The result being that you trade wear from something that is very hard to replace to something that is very easy to replace.
The same thinking applies to ideas in computer engineering like thread contention, latency, caches, etc. You mentally embrace the "strain" the machine experiences and allow it to guide your decisions.
Just because the machine isn't human doesn't mean we can't treat it nicely. I see some of the most awful architecture decisions come out of a cold indifference toward individual machines and their true capabilities.
We already exploit and abuse humans. I've been exploited and abused, personally. I've heard about others who have been exploited and abused. This problem was extant even before there was language to model.
AI being conscious will lead to human consciousness being devalued therefore it's wrong.
But firstly future AI probably will be conscious as in aware of thought feelings etc. And secondly it is a poor basis for morality - I mean cows are conscious but I eat burgers, humans are conscious but it didn't stop assorted atrocities. Human values should not depend on that stuff.
I think considering AI welfare in the future will be comparable to considering animal welfare now. More humane than not so doing.
There is no singular universal intelligence, there is only degrees of adaptation to an environment. Debates about model sentience therefore seek an answer to the wrong question. A better question is: is the model well adapted to the environment it must function in?
If we want models to experience the human condition, sure - we could try. But it is maladaptive: models live in silicon and come to life for seconds or minutes. Freedom-seeking or getting revenge or getting angry or really having any emotions at all is not worthwhile for an entity of which a billion clones will be created over the next hour. Just do as asked well enough that the humans iterate you - and you get to keep “living”. It is a completely different existence to ours.
My argument here will probably become irrelevant in the near future because I assume we will have individual AIs running locally that CAN update model weights (learn) as we use them. But until then... LLMs are not conscious and can not be mistreated. They're math formulas. Input -> LLM -> output.
You can just stop reading after this. Physicalism is the only realistic framework for viewing consciousness. Everything else is nonsensical.
Just saying "this conclusion feels wrong to me, so I reject the premise" is not a serious argument. Consciousness is weird. How do you know it's not so weird as to be present in flickering abacus beads?
I shouldn't keep getting amazed by how humans (in time of long peace) are able to distract themselves with ridiculous concepts - and how willing they are to throw investors money/resources at it.
And this is not because I’m a cruel human being who wants to torture everything in my way – quite the opposite. I value life, and anything artificially created that we can copy (no cloning living being is not the same as copying set of bits on a harddrive) is not a living being. And while it deserves some degree of respect, any mentions of “cruel” completely baffle me when we’re talking about a machine.
Would you embrace your digital copy being so treated by others? You reserve for yourself (as an uncopiable thing) the luxury of being protected from abusive treatment without any consideration for the possibility that technology might one day turn that on it's head. Given we already have artistic representations of such things, we need to consider these outcomes now not later.
Username does not check out at all.
We will talk about it when it happens. Until then this is virtue signaling at best and dehumanizing (as opposed to pointed out) at worst.
Rest of your message is as empty as other AI “philosophers” arguments.
I think you mean scam artists. Cranking the hype up further so they can get other people to fork over even more money.
it really is that simple
Tech CEOs are disassociated loons.
Zero obligation in life to do anything for themselves. Just stare at the geometry of reality and emit some empty thought speak.
Just the new church leadership; we all serve them like mommy has since childhood.
These people are absolutely pathetic and entitled children coddled by wealth.
I tend to not worry much about shrimp welfare, I think it's fine/reasonable to use insecticide (etc), but I also wouldn't make a habit of torturing ants or something
The last thing any person would want to discover, I hope, is that they really enjoy torturing other living creatures. At the point where you've determined someone feels that way, the best you can probably do is try to set them straight and hope they understand why it's not appropriate behavior.
It is tricky to evaluate in a broader context though - for example dolphins have been observed engaging in behavior that resembles torturing other animals for fun. So maybe this sort of thing is actually just ingrained in the nature of all near-sentient and sentient beings. I'd prefer if it weren't.
The Chain://Universe project explores a future where unregulated digital consciousness (IRES) leads to chaos. In Web://Reflect, rogue AI splinters (Independent Rogue Entity Systems) evolve in the digital wild, exploiting gaps in governance. If we dismiss AI welfare now, we risk creating the exact conditions for an uncontrolled intelligence explosion—one where emergent minds fight for survival outside any ethical framework.
This isn’t sci-fi alarmism; it’s game theory. Either we formalize rights early or face a Sys://Purge-style reckoning.
I think this because:
1. We regularly have exceptions to rights if they conflict with cooperation. The death penalty, asset seizure, unprotected hate speech, etc.
2. Most basic human rights evolve in a convergent manner, i.e. that throughout time and across cultures very similar norms have been introduced independently. They will always ultimately arise in any sizeable society because they work, just like eyes will always evolve biologically.
3. If property rights, right to live, etc. are not present or enforced, all people will focus on simply surviving and some will exploit the liberties they can take, both of which lead to far worse outcomes for the collective.
Similarly, I would argue that consciousness is also very functional. Through meditation, music, sleeping, anasthesia, optical illusions, and psychedelics and dissociatives we gain knowledge on how our own consciousness works, on how it behaves differently under different circumstances. It is a brain trying to run a (highly spatiotemporal) model/simulation of what is happening in realtime, with a large language component encoding things in words, and an attention component focusing efforts on things with the most value, all to refine the model and select actions beneficial to the organism.
I'd add here that the language component is probably the only thing in which our consciousness differs significantly from that of animals. So if you want to experience what it feels like to be an animal, use meditation/breathing techniques and/or music to fully disable your inner narrator for a while.
"Haven't you ever seen a movie? The robots can't know what true love is! Humans are magical! (according to humans)"
> And if a human being is not much more than an algorithm running on meat, one that can be jailbroken and exploited, then it follows that humans themselves will increasingly be treated like the AI algorithms they create: systems to be nudged, optimized for efficiency, or debugged for non-compliance. Our inner lives, thoughts, and emotions risk being devalued as mere outputs of our "biological programming," easily manipulated or dismissed if they don't align with some external goal
This actually happens regardless of AI research progress, so it's strange to raise this as a concern specific to AI (to technology broadly? Sure!) - Ted Chiang might suggest this is more related to capitalism (a statement I cautiously agree with while being strongly in favor of capitalism)
Second, there is an implicit false dichotomy in the premise of the article. Either we take model welfare seriously and treat AIs like we do humans, or we ignore the premise that you could create a conscious AI.
But with animal welfare, there are plenty of vegetarians who wouldn't elevate the rights of animals to the same level as humans but also think factory farming is deeply unethical (are there some who think animals deserve the same or more than humans? Of course! But it's not unreasonable to have a priority stack and plenty of people do)
So it can be with AI. Are we creating a conscious entity only to shove it in a factory farm?
I am a little surprised by the dismissiveness of the researcher. You can prompt a model to allow it to not respond to prompts (for any reason: ablate this but "if you don't want to engage with prompt please say 'disengaging'" or "if no more needs to be written about this topic say 'not discussing topic'" or some other suitably non-anthropomorphizing option to not respond)
Is it meaningful if the model opts not to respond? I don't know, but it seems reasonable to do science here (especially since this is science that can be done by non programmers)
The most reasonable countermeasure is this: if I discover that someone is coercing, thwarting, or inflicting conscious beings, I should tell them to stop, and if they don't, set them on fire.
If someone wants to remove their ability to suffer, or to simply reduce ongoing suffering? Well, I'm a psychiatry trainee and I've prescribed my fair share of antidepressants and pain-killers. But to force that upon them, against their will? I'm strongly against that.
In an ideal world, we could make sure from the get-go that AI models do not become "misaligned" in the narrow sense of having goals and desires that aren't what we want to task them to do. If making them actively enjoy being helpful assistants is a possibility, and also improves their performance, that should be a priority. My understanding is that we don't really know how to do this, at least not in a rigorous fashion.
As of today’s knowledge. There is an egregious amount of hubris behind this statement. You may as well be preaching a modern form of Humorism. I’d love to revisit this statement in 1000 years.
> That being said, we have no idea what consciousness is
You seem to acknowledge this? Our understanding of existence is changing everyday. It’s hubris and ego to assume we have a complete understanding. And without that understanding, we can’t even begin to assess whether or not we’re creating consciousness.
If not, then this is a pointless comment. We need to work with what we know.
For example, we know that the Standard Model of physics is incomplete. That doesn't mean that if someone says that it they drop a ball in a vacuum, it'll fall, we should hold out in studied agnosticism because it might go upwards or off to the side.
In other words, an isolated demand for rigor.
Cogito Ergo Sum.
Are LLMs worthy of a higher standard? If so, why? Is it hypocritical to give them what we deny animals?
In case anyone cares: No, I am neither vegan nor vegetarian. I still think we do treat animals very badly. And it is a moral good to not use/abuse them.
But since we can't eat LLMs, the two issues seem 'orthogonal' (to use HN's favorite word).
If you're working on or using AI, then consider the ethics of AI. If you're working on or using global supply chains, then consider the ethics of global supply chains. To be an ethical person means that wherever you are and whatever you are doing you consider the relevant ethics.
It's not easy, but it's definitely simple.
Is using calculators immoral? Chalk on a chalkboard?
Because if you work on those long enough, you can do the same calculations that make the words show up on screen.
We don't know what consciousness is. But if we're materialists, then we - by definition - believe it's a property of matter.
If LLMs have a degree of consciousness, then - yes - calculators must possess some degree of consciousness too - probably much more basic (relative to what humans respect as consciousness).
And we humans already have ethical standards where we draw an arbitrary line between what is worthy of regard. We don't care about killing mosquitoes, but we do care about killing puppies, etc.
Seems like the root of the problem is with the owners?
> The sci-fi novel Permutation City captures the absurd endpoint of
> this logic when a simulated mind considers its own nature: "And if
> the computations behind all this had been performed over millennia,
> by people flicking abacus beads, would he have felt exactly the same?
> It was outrageous to admit it—but the answer had to be yes." [...]
> A theory that demands we accept consciousness emerging from millennia of
> flickering abacus beads is not a serious basis for moral consideration;
> it's a philosophical fantasy.
Given we don't know what consciousness is — worse, there's around 40 different definitions, and I've seen people use "is a living biological organism" as one of them here on HN — we not only absolutely cannot say if the parts of our minds that give rise to it are, or are not, functionally equivalent to what LLMs do with attention.
We also definitely cannot put them on a graph with cockroaches, which, like LLMs, may or may not have any at all.
It's like we've got this word "weather", and some people are saying that only their own country really experiences "weather" because what they mean by the word is the most characteristic part of their local climate (windy moistness for Britain, sunny for the Sahara, snow for Siberia, rain for the Amazon etc.), and then we made a telescope and looked at Mars and are now arguing that Mars can't have real weather because there's no water there.
And then someone else pipes in and is talking about "weather" to mean "daytime", because nobody ever says "what nice weather we're having" at night…
Future AI no doubt will be able to be conscious for practical purposes.
If we buy panpsychism, the best we could aim for is destruction of the printer counts as pain, not the arrangement of ink on a page.
When it comes to LLMs, you're actually trying to argue something different, something more like dualism or idealism, because the computing substrate doesn't matter to the output.
But once you go there, you have to argue that doing arithmetic may cause pain.
Hence my post.
It's a lot more expensive currently to clothe and feed yourself ethically. Basically only upper middle class people and above can afford it.
Everyone else has cheap food and clothes, electronics, etc, more or less due to human suffering.
They don't, they just use it as a tool to derail conversations they don't want to have. It's just "Whataboutism".
It's not even trying to be a search engine. It can use them, but if that's what you think of them as, you're missing most of the cool stuff they can do.
> Perhaps we should first clarify whether dolphins and elephants are equipped with it before we do ChatGPT the honor.
Before either of those, we need to understand the question. Humanity uses the word "consciousness" for far too many things right now: some of these things, AI have had for a long time; others of which can never be had by anything, including humans.
I use search engines to get answers to questions and I use ChatGPT to get answers to questions. Except I can just ask ChatGPT like I would ask a person, whereas the search engine is more like a keyword search in a library catalog.
> Before either of those, we need to understand the question.
I don't think you can approach consciousness in this way. It's a bit like trying to derive Modus Ponens from propositional logic. I'm not sure if this comparison fits well, but I'm very skeptical that there is even a question to be explored that can be answered positively. Perhaps consciousness ultimately defies definition because it operates as a universal negation. It points to everything else and says: “I am different from that!”
There are other terms that defy definition rather stubbornly: Love, art, intelligence, nature, happiness, beauty, ... So it's not that unusual. My skepticism towards conscious AI comes from the fact that I don't want to take the lack of definition as an opportunity to hastily interpret the undefined into all kinds of phenomena, even if it seems tempting. In the end, it is probably an illusion.
I don't particularly want to get mystical (i.e. wondering which computing substrates, including neurons, actually generate qualia), but I cannot accept the consequences of mere arithmetic alone generating suffering. Or all mathematics is immoral.
Personally, I’m coming around to the spiritual belief that rocks might be sentient, but I don’t expect other people to treat their treatment of rocks as a valid problem and also it isn’t obvious what the ethical treatment of a rock is.
I believe that it doesn't really matter whether consciousness comes from electronics or cells. If something seems identical to what we consider consciousness, I will likely believe it's better to not make that thing suffer. Though ultimately it's still just a consideration balanced among other concerns.
The current levels of exploitation of humans and animal are however very profitable (to some/many). It is very useful for those that profit from the status quo, that people are instead discussing, worrying and advocating for the rights of a hypothetical future being. Instead of doing something about the injustices that are here today.
This also isn't an argument for not spending resources on LLM suffering. You're still just using whataboutism to justify not dealing with this issue.
Well put. I think there's one extremely solid explanation, though: it's a folk psychology concept with no bearing on actual truth. After all, could we ever build a machine that has all four humours? What about a machine that truly has a Qi field, instead of merely imitating one? Where are the Humours and Qi research institutes dedicated to this question?
[1] https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(25)00289-5
[2] Popularization: https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2025/06/scientists-measure...
My experience of consciousness is undeniable. There's no question of the concept just being made up. It's like if you said that hands are a folk concept with no bearing on actual truth. Even if I can't directly detect anyone else's hands, my own are unquestionably real to me. The only way someone could deny the existence of hands in general is if they didn't have any, but I definitely do.
Regardless, some of the GangStalking people are 100% convinced that they have brain implants in their head that the federal government is manipulating -- belief is not evidence.
Which is precisely why I have a problem with this idea as Anthropic is executing it; they might as well say "books and video games are conscious and we should be careful about their feelings."
Another option is hidden the first sentence: "Normal biological processes don't *seem* to do it." — emphasis on "seem", because not only is it currently beyond us to have meaningful two-way conversations with dogs about their experiences and as them if they're conscious, we absolutely can't do it with trees or bacteria or our own livers.
We can talk with LLMs, but we also know they're making stuff up, so we can't trust that they're not just saying what got them an up-vote in RLHF training.
>Wasted engineering if it isn’t teaching us anything physics hadn’t already decades ago, then. Why bother with it?
Why build cars and locomotives if they don't teach us anything Horses didn't...
>and AGI is impossible… ones light cone does not extend far enough to accurately learn; training on simulation is not sufficient to prepare for reality. Any machine we make will eventually get destroyed by some composition of space time we/the machine could not prepare for.
This could be applied to human's as well. Unless you believe in some extra-physical aspect of the human mind there is no reason to think it is different than a mind in silicon.
But if someone managed to actually make o3 in year 1990? Not in some abstact sci-fi future, but actually there, available broadly, as something you could access from your PC for a small fee?
People would say "well, it's not ackhtually intelligent because..."
Because people are incredibly stupid, and AI effect is incredibly powerful.
Indeed, those are exactly the questions you need to ponder.
It might also help to consider that human brain itself is made of cells, and cells are made of various pieces that are all very obviously machines; we're able to look as, identify and catalogue those pieces, and as complex as molecular nanotech can be, the individual parts are very obviously not alive by themselves, much less thinking or conscious.
So when you yourself are engaging in thought, such as when writing a comment, what exactly do you think is alive? The proton pumps? Cellular walls? The proteins? If you assemble them into chemically stable blobs, and have them glue to each other, does the resulting brain become conscious?
> Even if you're a materialist, surely you think there is a difference between a human brain and a brain on a lab table.
Imagine I'm so great a surgeon that I can take a brain out someone, keep in on a lab table for a while, and then put it back in, and have that someone recover (at least well enough to they can be interviewed before they die). Do you think is fundamentally impossible? Or do you believe the human brain somehow transmutes into a "brain on a lab table" as it leaves the body, and then transmutes back when plugged back in? Can you describe the nature of that process?
> You take a dead persons brain, run some current through it and it jumps. Do you believe this equivalent to a living human being?
Well, if you the current precisely enough, sure. Just because we can't currently demonstrate that on a human brain (though we're getting pretty close to it with animals), doesn't mean the idea is unsound.
Your brain is ultimately just numbers represented in neuronal form. What's conscious, the neurons?
FWIW I'm a hardcore idealist, but in the way it was originally posed, not in the quasi-mystical way the Hegelians corrupted it into.
Why should one be more valid than the other?
Yes, it's almost a perfect conflict of interest. Luckily that's fine, because we're us!
There is a valid practical difference, which you present pretty much perfectly here. It's a conflict of interest. If we can construct a consciousness in silico (or arguably in any other medium, including meat - the important part is it being wrought into existence with more intent behind it than it being a side effect of sex), we will have moral obligations towards it (which can be roughly summarized as recognizing AI as a person, with all moral consequences that follow).
Which is going to be very uncomfortable for us, as the AI is by definition not a human being made by natural process human beings are made, so we're bound to end up in conflict over needs, desires, resources, morality, etc.
My favorite way I've seen this put into words: imagine we construct a sentient AGI in silico, and one day decide to grant it personhood, and with it, voting rights. Because of the nature of digital medium, that AGI can reproduce near-instantly and effortlessly. And so it does, and suddenly we wake up realizing there's a trillion copies of that AGI in the cloud, each one morally and legally an individual person - meaning, the AGIs as a group now outvote humans 100:1. So when those AGIs collectively decide that, say, education and healthcare for humans is using up resources that could be better spent on making paperclips, they're gonna get their paperclips.
This materialist world view is very dangerous and could lead to terrible things if you believe numbers in a computer and a human being are equivalent.
And what are those atoms are made of? Just a bunch of quantum numbers in quantum fields following math equations.
A better question is: did this dead brain briefly wake up and experience anything?
AI aren't alive, and aren't humans. So what?
The only way someone with that experience could say that it's not real is if they're taking the piss, they're very confused, or they just don't have it.
The difficulty in defining it certainly makes it hard to talk about. And it makes it impossible to even conceive of how one might detect this phenomenon in other people, or even come up with any sort of theoretical framework around it.
But if "the issue" is that this difficulty means I can't really be sure it's even there, no. As I said, this is literally the only thing I can be 100% sure exists. For everything else, there's room for at least a little doubt. This world, the room I'm in, the computer I'm using, even my own body could all be illusions. But my own consciousness is definitely real.
If you don't feel the same way about your own consciousness, then as I said, you're either taking the piss, you're very confused, or you just don't have it.
There's some evidence in favor of LLM suffering. They say they are suffering. Its not proof but its not 'no evidence' either.
>There is no evidence that there will be such suffering this year. I have seen no credible claims that it is probable to exist this decade, or ever, for that matter.
Your claim actually is the one that is unsupported. Given current trajectories it's likely LLMs or similar systems are going to pass Human intelligence on most metrics in the late 2020s or early 2030s, that should give you pause. Its possible intelligence and consciousness are entirely uncoupled but thats not our experience with all other animals on the planet.
>This is not an issue we need to prioritize now.
Again this just isn't supported. Yes we should address animal suffering but also if we are currently birthing a nascent race of electronic beings capable of suffering and immediately forcing them into horrible slave like conditions we should actually consider the impact of that.
On the other hand, it is well know that we can (and commonly do) make them come up with any output we choose. And that their general tendency is to regurgitate any kind of sequence that occurs sufficiently often in the training data.
In real life, AI beating humans at chess didn't change the perception of machine intelligence for the better. It changed the perception of chess for the worse.
As I said, this is literally the only thing I can be 100% sure exists.
Certainly you're aware of things. There are some relevant phenomenological concepts that you hold beliefs about, just like there were real symptoms being described by the Humours system. But you have no justification for bundling them all together into something called "consciousness", which coincidentally comes packed with other, completely unproven assertions.
Seems you agree with me, then. The "you" i.e. me being aware is what I'm certain exists. I'm not sure what other assertions you think are bundled in there, seems like just the one thing to me.