I have reasons to believe current AIs are conscious & have qualia/experiences, so the moral question is relevant now as well.
EDIT: That statement probably sounds crazy. Let me clarify: I don't have an argument that current AI systems are conscious or specifically sentient. I have heard many reasonable arguments for why they are not. But the thing is, all of these arguments would, with variation, apply to the human brain as well. I think, therefore I am; I am not ready to bite the bullet that consciousness doesn't exist.
I know that I am a sentient being, and I presume that every other human is too. And there is not, as far as I know, a categorial difference between physical brains and electronic systems that is relevant to the question of whether AI systems are conscious. Ergo, I must (until shown otherwise) assume that they are.
[If you really fall down this rabbit hole, you get into areas of panpsychism and everything being conscious, but I digress.]
> I have reasons to believe current AIs are conscious & have qualia/experiences, so the moral question is relevant now as well.
There are very strong reasons to prioritize alleviating the immiseration of humans as a consequence of AI over mitigating any hypothetical conscious suffering of AI.
We already do that with all kinds of known sentient beings, like the animals we subjugate for our needs.
I would go further and put all biological sentient beings (and also many biological non-sentient beings like plants), and ecosystems ahead of AI in priority of the order in which we worry about their treatment.
I am not advocating for the stopping or even slowing down our usage of AI. I think that the accelerating progress is providing more value to more sentient beings (people and machines), and that this is fundamentally a good thing.
I am also not vegetarian -- I eat meat. I also think factory farming is evil. This is not cognitive dissonance -- I just believe that if forced to make a binary choice, the benefits of eating meat outweigh my moral qualms. But in real life we aren't forced to make a binary choice. We should be pursuing lab-grown meat, as well as developing ways to treat farm animals ethically at scale. I am disgusted by the cruelty shown towards animals under industrial farming conditions, but I still make the tradeoff of eating meat.
So it is with AI. The benefit that we and society as a whole gets from advancing AI technologies is absolutely worth it. I'm not a luddite. But we should be aware of the potential that we are doing harm to and/or enslaving sentient beings, and try to make things better where we can. I do not have a concrete proposal to share here, but we should remain aware of the issue at least, and react accordingly to the most egregious violations of our duty to protect sentient beings, even machine intelligences.
EDIT: That statement probably sounds crazy. Let me clarify: I don't have an argument that current AI systems are conscious or specifically sentient. I have heard many reasonable arguments for why they are not. But the thing is, all of these arguments would, with variation, apply to the human brain as well. I think, therefore I am; I am not ready to bite the bullet that consciousness doesn't exist.
I know that I am a sentient being, and I presume that every other human is too. And there is not, as far as I know, a categorial difference between physical brains and electronic systems that is relevant to the question of whether AI systems are conscious. Ergo, I must (until shown otherwise) assume that they are.
[If you really fall down this rabbit hole, you get into areas of panpsychism and everything being conscious, but I digress.]