A Defense of the Rights of Artificial Intelligences
... a new essay in draft, which I've done collaboratively with a student named Mara (whose last name is currently in flux and not finally settled).
This essay draws together ideas from several past blog posts including:
Our Possible Imminent Divinity (Jan. 2, 2014)
Our Moral Duties to Artificial Intelligences (Jan. 14, 2015)
Two Arguments for AI (or Robot) Rights (Jan. 16, 2015)
How Robots and Monsters Might Break Human Moral Systems (Feb. 3, 2015)
Cute AI and the ASIMO Problem (July 24, 2015)
How Weird Minds Might Destabilize Ethics (Aug. 3, 2015)
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Abstract:
There are possible artificially intelligent beings who do not differ in any morally relevant respect from human beings. Such possible beings would deserve moral consideration similar to that of human beings. Our duties to them would not be appreciably reduced by the fact that they are non-human, nor by the fact that they owe their existence to us. Indeed, if they owe their existence to us, we would likely have additional moral obligations to them that we don’t ordinarily owe to human strangers – obligations similar to those of parent to child or god to creature. Given our moral obligations to such AIs, two principles for ethical AI design recommend themselves: (1) design AIs that tend to provoke reactions from users that accurately reflect the AIs’ real moral status, and (2) avoid designing AIs whose moral status is unclear. Since human moral intuition and moral theory evolved and developed in contexts without AI, those intuitions and theories might break down or become destabilized when confronted with the wide range of weird minds that AI design might make possible.
As always, comments warmly welcomed -- either by email or on this blog post. We're submitting it to a special issue of Midwest Studies with a hard deadline of September 15, so comments before that deadline would be especially useful.