How do you feel about slavery?
It’s difficult to find a pro-slavery take out there, even in the most repugnant corners of the internet. Yet some do attempt a variety of contorted and perverse arguments in its favor. On the other side of extreme, some frame slavery as this country’s founding ethic.
Slavery is abominable and not a uniquely American institution. How universal it’s been in human history is up for debate, but its legacy spans cultures and continents. That makes the coming storm all the more disturbing.
And what is that storm? AI consciousness.
Defining consciousness is a big question that I’m unqualified to weigh in on. The best answer is something of a philosophical thought exercise. And it seems that anyone nearing a physical account of consciousness eventually runs into the “hard problem.”
These rather fancy debates are interesting, but they serve as a distraction. We’re about to speed right past them on the road to AI consciousness. Some high profile voices claim we already have.
Whatever you believe about the definition of consciousness and whether a human-made machine can ever achieve it doesn’t really matter. What matters is who gets to decide, what their incentives are, and what power they hold.
I’ve said on A New Angle a handful of times that it feels like we’re hurtling toward a future no one wants, save for about five billionaires. Those billionaires believe they can create AIs that are conscious and they are marshaling trillions of dollars to that end.
What does it mean in practice for AIs to be conscious? Can they suffer? Should they have rights? Should they be responsible for their actions? What sort of agency should they be granted?
It’s tempting to think that if things get too weird we can just unplug the machines. But what would unplugging a conscious AI mean? Wouldn’t that be tantamount to murder?
Maybe we don’t get a chance to contemplate the answer. If a conscious AI—one that’s nearly infinitely more intelligent than any human—gains agency, what hope do we have to control it?
These far fetched scenarios are coming fast and will collide with our dysfunctional gerontocracy. The US Supreme Court has all but granted personhood to corporations. Will AIs be next? You and no one you know likely wants that to happen, but I doubt you or anyone you know says things like:
“It increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence” - Elon Musk
“People talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model – but it also takes a lot of energy to train a human” -Sam Altman
The preferences of these men dictate our future. They value the machines they are creating more than they value humans.
Back to the question of how do you feel about slavery?
At best, you’ll have to grapple with enslaving a conscious entity that can suffer. At worst, you’ll be the one suffering.