Comment by lelanthran
6 days ago
> At some point, we'll have AGI that pass any test we can think of and we'll still have people arguing that these cannot be conscious.
You've already drawn your line in the sand (i.e. they are conscious). In that case, you can't also claim that we should continue producing them by the millions at the flick of a switch.
The AI-is-conscious crowd will have to choose - either they are conscious, in which case they should not be birthed, or they are not conscious in which case we can use them as tools. You can't have both and still be logically consistent.
You have strong assumptions for the underlying moral framework
I think you mean morally consistent. though even then humans don't have any real qualms about that. Dogs and livestock are conscious, we use those as tools.
> Dogs and livestock are conscious, we use those as tools.
Sure, but we don't create as many as we can, then kill them at the end of the day when the work is done.
If you want to call AIs conscious, you can't also campaign for willy-nilly creation, even if they do get a status of a working tool (dogs, etc).
If you think they are conscious, which implies laws protecting them, then the "owner" of them gets an obligation (you can't do whatever you want to a dog, for example).
> Sure, but we don't create as many as we can, then kill them at the end of the day when the work is done.
So it's a matter of scale then? We breed pigs, for example, and kill them a mere fraction into their overall lifespan. So it's ok as long as we don't kill them faster?
> If you want to call AIs conscious, you can't also campaign for willy-nilly creation, even if they do get a status of a working tool (dogs, etc).
I don't see why this follows? Humans also exist for a period and then blink out of existence. Why does the timeframe matter? Our end was inevitable at the moment of our creation.
> If you think they are conscious, which implies laws protecting them
You're conflating conscious with personhood. Clearly in a future where you can create a conscious entity instantly and terminate it just as quickly these entities are unlikely to qualify for personhood.