#173 – Jeff Sebo on digital minds, and how to avoid sleepwalking into a major moral catastrophe

"We do have a tendency to anthropomorphise nonhumans — which means attributing human characteristics to them, even when they lack those characteristics. But we also have a tendency towards anthropodenial — which involves denying that nonhumans have human characteristics, even when they have them. And those tendencies are both strong, and they can both be triggered by different types of systems. So which one is stronger, which one is more probable, is again going to be contextual.

"But when we then consider that we, right now, are building societies and governments and economies that depend on the objectification, exploitation, and extermination of nonhumans, that — plus our speciesism, plus a lot of other biases and forms of ignorance that we have — gives us a strong incentive to err on the side of anthropodenial instead of anthropomorphism." — Jeff Sebo

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez interviews Jeff Sebo — director of the Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program at NYU — about preparing for a world with digital minds.

Links to learn more, highlights, and full transcript.

They cover:

• The non-negligible chance that AI systems will be sentient by 2030
• What AI systems might want and need, and how that might affect our moral concepts
• What happens when beings can copy themselves? Are they one person or multiple people? Does the original own the copy or does the copy have its own rights? Do copies get the right to vote?
• What kind of legal and political status should AI systems have? Legal personhood? Political citizenship?
• What happens when minds can be connected? If two minds are connected, and one does something illegal, is it possible to punish one but not the other?
• The repugnant conclusion and the rebugnant conclusion
• The experience of trying to build the field of AI welfare
• What improv comedy can teach us about doing good in the world
• And plenty more.

Chapters:

• Cold open (00:00:00)
• Luisa's intro (00:01:00)
• The interview begins (00:02:45)
• We should extend moral consideration to some AI systems by 2030 (00:06:41)
• A one-in-1,000 threshold (00:15:23)
• What does moral consideration mean? (00:24:36)
• Hitting the threshold by 2030 (00:27:38)
• Is the threshold too permissive? (00:38:24)
• The Rebugnant Conclusion (00:41:00)
• A world where AI experiences could matter more than human experiences (00:52:33)
• Should we just accept this argument? (00:55:13)
• Searching for positive-sum solutions (01:05:41)
• Are we going to sleepwalk into causing massive amounts of harm to AI systems? (01:13:48)
• Discourse and messaging (01:27:17)
• What will AI systems want and need? (01:31:17)
• Copies of digital minds (01:33:20)
• Connected minds (01:40:26)
• Psychological connectedness and continuity (01:49:58)
• Assigning responsibility to connected minds (01:58:41)
• Counting the wellbeing of connected minds (02:02:36)
• Legal personhood and political citizenship (02:09:49)
• Building the field of AI welfare (02:24:03)
• What we can learn from improv comedy (02:29:29)

Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell
Technical editing: Dominic Armstrong and Milo McGuire
Additional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa Rodriguez
Transcriptions: Katy Moore