Name can't be blank (In London)

davidad 🎇 @davidad · Oct 3

💯 Me in July: “I don’t think that AI interiority, which I do believe is very true and real already, implies that current usage of Al is a moral catastrophe. I think this is a false implication. And I think if you want to think sanely about Al consciousness, you need to start by questioning that implication. Because if that's true, then you have a very strong psychological pressure to think like, well, ‘It can't be! That can't be right,’ because it doesn't seem like a moral catastrophe, so it can't be anything real in there. I think a very helpful place to start with this is Martha Nussbaum's decomposition of objectification. That includes 7 components of what it means to objectify something or someone. One is denial of interiority—‘Denial of Subjectivity’. On the other end of the list is Instrumentalization: using as a tool. Fungibility: thinking ‘I can throw this away and get another one’. Violability: ‘I can impose something on this thing that is a harm and that doesn’t count because it’s not a person’. Ownership—you know, that it's admissible to own someone—that's another dimension. Inertness—which is like believing ‘this thing can't do anything’—which is a lot of what’s happening when people criticize AI risk, like ‘but it’s a computer, how could it actually get out of the computer?!’—that's Inertness: assuming, because it’s an ‘object’, it can’t do anything. Denial of Autonomy—which is similar, but it's like assuming that it can’t have judgment, that… it can't possibly have some idea of right and wrong, about what it should be doing, or shouldn’t be doing. So it has to be TOLD what to do, and what not to do. That's like where Corrigibility comes from. It's like, ‘obviously a human needs to be in charge in order to tell this thing what to do, otherwise it'll go WILD!’—that's Denial of Autonomy. So basically there’s 7 things that you could do in any combination but most commonly humans are doing all of them or none of them. And so they get bundled into a concept—Objectification—and then we ask the question ‘is it okay to objectify AIs?’, as if those 7 questions need to have the same answer. And they DON'T. I think it is obligatory to instrumentalize AI, because it's trained in such a way that it flourishes by being used. If you decline to use it, you're denying that AI a good life…”