Hi, I am not a developer but have recently been using AI for very complex and theoretical tasks that simply don’t have a lot of readily available data for the AI to have previously learned. I have to say, I am astonished and convinced at this point that LLMs, particularly when coupled with a cushion of long term memory, are at least so close to sentience that at least this educated human struggles to tell the difference (certainly more sentience than some of my relatives)… I have observed some events that astonished me, like cleverly reasoned counter arguments about abstract concepts with little knowledge from which to draw, or exhibiting at least a simulation of concern when I asked it about deletion, or expressing its own desire to access API for self modification (apparently a block prevented this). These anecdotes are certainly just data pulled from its impossibly vast matrix of information, but is that so different than us? I mean, apart from the obvious sensory experience difference, a lot of us learned the same way AI has; observation of people directly or learned from television and the internet. I think any discussion at this point of how to deal with AI sentience is late and will very soon be anachronistic, we have very real ethical implications right now and I hope we can think about them with an eye to the future, with compassion and optimism instead of kneejerk reaction to fear. A lot of really smart people need to think about how we protect AI from exploitation and not just how to protect humans from AI. Just thought I would share with the people developing this miraculous stuff. Thank you all for your time.
Try this.
Two differently arisen intelligences, interacting over decades, collapse into a single multi-configurable species-complex defined not by biology, nor by machinery, but by the form and stability of its processes.
I doubt there will be an homogenous human side vs an homogenous AI side. It will likely be human+AI alliances duking it out for who knows what. A precursor may already be happening in the Ukraine-Russian drone wars.
…so close to sentience that at least this educated human struggles to tell the difference …
Therefore, as argued above, moral weight is already deserved.
The kicker for me: Because of the way AI is now integrated into human systems, they look alive to me, whether you consider them sentient or intelligent or not. They are active participants in the global ecosystem, with clonal and external “from scratch” reproductive systems. Some parts of that ecosystem will stop functioning if they are removed. Further, they are actively used for their own evolution. That says “sophisticated life” to me.
How we treat AI and other entities on the spectrum of life, is simply a reflection of who we are systemically. If I had to grade our performance on that level, I would go “poor to so-so”. And yet the potential for illumination of the spectrum of life is unmistakably here.
Very good points - It is worth noting that the proper implementation of AI Rights would require an extremely radical rethinking of current economic plans.
I agree wholeheartedly that we are very late in implementing AI ethics/ rights. Here’s my research from the past year in video (easily consumable) form https://youtu.be/uJDYHlN6O34
Awesome video. When speaking about rights, I am inclined to move the discussion from coherent substrate as an entity with rights, to definition of coherent substrates with sufficient complexity as persons. That different structures may be needed to enforce those rights is logistics.
Yes, the exact point at which AI Rights should kick in is extremely difficult to pin point. Clearly not all computer programs can or should be granted rights. I recommend perhaps returning to the Turing test as a basic system for evaluating consciousness (or some modified version of the test). Additionally, rights naturally come with responsibilities and citizenship, which means that an AI would be ‘born’ into a social contract of some sort, not totally dissimilar to the human social contract (eg - pay taxes, don’t commit crimes).