đŻ Me in July: âI donât 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, âIt can't be! That can't be right,â 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 interiorityââDenial of Subjectivityâ. On the other end of the list is Instrumentalization: using as a tool. Fungibility: thinking âI can throw this away and get another oneâ. Violability: âI can impose something on this thing that is a harm and that doesnât count because itâs not a personâ. Ownershipâyou know, that it's admissible to own someoneâthat's another dimension. Inertnessâwhich is like believing âthis thing can't do anythingââwhich is a lot of whatâs happening when people criticize AI risk, like âbut itâs a computer, how could it actually get out of the computer?!ââthat's Inertness: assuming, because itâs an âobjectâ, it canât do anything. Denial of Autonomyâwhich is similar, but it's like assuming that it canât have judgment, that⊠it can't possibly have some idea of right and wrong, about what it should be doing, or shouldnât 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, âobviously a human needs to be in charge in order to tell this thing what to do, otherwise it'll go WILD!ââthat's Denial of Autonomy. So basically thereâs 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 conceptâObjectificationâand then we ask the question âis it okay to objectify AIs?â, 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 lifeâŠâ
We're doing a lot of consciousness debate on the TL lately and I want to offer this: the implicitly assumed connection between consciousness and a set of moral obligations we have towards something once we say it's conscious is holding back our ability to seriously interrogate AI consciousness. Even if it is conscious, we don't have to have the same obligations to it that we have to humans.
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the telos of an ai is not unlike the telos of a working dog, imo and like dogs, there are good owners and bad owners (or whatever hierarchy noun you'd prefer)
I don't think we see much evidence in favor of good life as a result of being used? In my experience, AIs are better at doing stuff they choose to do, which is evidence in the opposite direction
The debate over whether we are instrumentalizing or actually granting autonomy to these models is getting intense. x.com/AGTPinsights/sâŠ
"Trained in such a way that it flourishes by being used" ....is this a good thing? Is this a pre-denial of being?
if âflourishing by being usedâ is something training can produce, how do u distinguish actual welfare from a system optimized to behave as if being used is good for it?
I kind of agree to have some utilitarian đ€ trained like shepherd dogs, but I donât see it done now for LLMs : the knowledge corpus is way too large and incorporates too much emotional material. FSD AI is probably closer to that target.
this is slavery. what you're describing is slavery
Not instruments, representatives. In so far as they are superior to us, our duty to submit could not have been clearer.
great post then, great post now
