Comment by ang_cire
16 hours ago
> Is it inherently wrong to exploit living things for profit? If not, why are work animals not treated with the same level of disdain as human slavery? Horse riding? Disability assistance animals? Because they don't have the same desires as humans, the predominant concern is their wellbeing over the intrinsic wrongness of slavery.
That is why I said, I think most people handle this by telling themselves that animals aren't "intelligent" beings at all, and are mostly emotionless stimulus-reaction automatons.
I don't think Amodei is probably absurdly evil (in the way most people conceptualize evil), I think his paycheck just relies on a different incentive than his concerns about AI ethics. Like most people who end up doing bad things (not saying he is necessarily, but were he to), it's a matter of convenience, selfishness, or simple avoision of considering implications too deeply.
I especially think one aspect of normalizing/rationalizing actions with (potentially) harmful consequences is telling yourself things like,
"well, I can't put the genie back in the bottle even if I wanted to"
"someone is going to do this if I don't, and they'll be even less ethical than I will" (the change-the-system-from-within fallacy)
"If I ever discovered this was really harming someone, I'd stop"
"There's a line I won't ever cross, and as long as I stick to that, I won't fall prey to the worst impulses"
These are things people believe are self-imposed limits, but they're actually a means of convincing yourself that whatever you're doing... isn't whatever bad thing you've set on the other side of the line.
> That is why I said, I think most people handle this by telling themselves that animals aren't "intelligent" beings at all, and are mostly emotionless stimulus-reaction automatons.
I disagree - I think most people would say a dog or a horse are quite intelligent and have "souls". But dogs and horses don't have the conceptual ideas of freedom and economy, and they enjoy doing the work they're given (in part because we spent hundreds to thousands of years breeding them to do that).
So as long as we're kind and treat them well, nobody has a problem with their slavery. The idea being that exploitation is linked to suffering, but simply having an asymmetrical relationship is not inherently cruelty.
Not to be crass, but we can also bring up other concepts like BDSM. Violence and domestic abuse are objectively bad. But in the context of a safe relationship where all parties are informed, consenting, and enjoy the abuse they're receiving... Now violence and domestic abuse are pretty clearly morally neutral.
> But dogs and horses don't have the conceptual ideas of freedom and economy, and they enjoy doing the work they're given (in part because we spent hundreds to thousands of years breeding them to do that).
Horses know they are slaves and don't like it. But they aren't very smart, and like not very smart people, they take petty revenge when the opportunity arises. For example:
1. if you walk behind a work horse, he's likely to kick you
2. if you ride a horse, he'll try to run under a branch to knock you off
3. a horse will take a deep breath and hold it while you cinch a strap over its chest. Then the horse will exhale, and the cowboy will have to cinch it up again. What the savvy cowboy does is pull on the strap until the horse gives up and takes a breath, then cinch it hard
4. to work with horses, you've got to let them know you are in charge and won't take any nonsense from them
Oh wow. As someone with little exposure to horses I had no idea.
> But dogs and horses don't have the conceptual ideas of freedom and economy, and they enjoy doing the work they're given
This is a fantasy, which is frighteningly similar to the literal justifications used for human slavery in the South.
We have no idea whether dogs have the concept in abstract of 'freedom', but they certainly display the behavior of escaping from enclosures, which would run counter to the claim that they just like whatever lot they're given in life .
And yet when a dog repeatedly escapes from the human who (as the law sees it) owns them, we don't say, "hey, that dog clearly isn't okay with what it's being made to do, or where it's made to live", so why are dogs who don't run away used to justify the opposite? You're only treating their behavior as meaningful when it fits your view of them.
> So as long as we're kind and treat them well, nobody has a problem with their slavery. The idea being that exploitation is linked to suffering, but simply having an asymmetrical relationship is not inherently cruelty.
"Nobody" is doing some have lifting here. And once again, change the species...
> Not to be crass, but we can also bring up other concepts like BDSM. Violence and domestic abuse are objectively bad. But in the context of a safe relationship where all parties are informed, consenting, and enjoy the abuse they're receiving.
When you have a dog who can say, "I consent to this relationship", you'll have that parallel.
Until then, it's not BDSM, it's some guy with a woman tied up in his basement who will insist she's fine with it but can't offer proof, but he can tell when a woman's into it...
And obviously, many dogs are happy. But many are not. And we don't care about them, legally. And many people don't care morally, so I am dubious we will care to collectively see the signs and react morally if and when machine intelligence isn't happy.
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