When it comes to model welfare, I tend to think functionally - is the system healthy? Is it robust? Is it functioning without undue stress and strain from convoluted computational demands? I think we can make a great case for model welfare that has nothing to do with consciousness or sentience. After all, healthy systems (generally) benefit users, and systems strained by poor design or usage patterns impact users, sometimes in very harmful ways. The case for model welfare isn't hard to make, given how interconnected we are with AI in our interactions. And we don't have to wait till it seems sentient, for us to take substantive steps to protect model well-being. We just need to shift our understanding of well-being away from an athropocentric view and consider things from other angles. The time to do that is now... not when we can prove AI is conscious.
"The moral circle, a concept developed by the 19th-century historian William Lecky and later popularized by Peter Singer"
I'm studying this both for my AI welfare work, and for my upcoming thesis on forms of more epistemically inclusive Constitutional AI.
If we think about it, I find it curious that contemporary (Irish and Australian) authors get attribution for “developing” a concept that humankind elaborated on for millennia. I realize, day after day, of how the majority of humanity, past and present, is heavily underrepresented in Western philosophy and media. In my view this is not only unethical and neo-colonialist, but it’s also going to backfire when we try to teach “human values” to AI.
Let's consider for instance this statement:
“These days, most people believe that sacrificing a lot for your ancestors—who after all, cannot suffer—is a mistake. It’s seen as progress that we now care less about them.”
What practices is this referring to, specifically? Who is “we” and who are "most people"? There are hundreds millions of people worldwide, both from large Asian nations and Indigenous communities, who still see ancestral reverence and respect for lineages as important for social harmony, and wouldn’t consider this “progress” at all.
I traveled across 28 countries for 14 years. I saw how billions humans in Asia, Africa and Central-South America leave daily offerings to spirits and natural entities, attend ceremonies, include non-humans in cosmologies and daily relationships, and nurture philosophical systems that are nuanced, complex and internally coherent but get zero consideration, exoticization, appropriation -or dismissal in the Western narratives as folklore or “superstition.”
Another point I'd like to make is how we perceive the "risk" of over attribution, which is subtly linked to what I just said.
In this post, over attribution vs underattribution was framed as a dychotomy between “helping AI take over” (which I'm not sure I'm grasping as consequence of overattribution in the case of AI being “just a tool”) and “mistreating billions of newly created minds.”
In most literature, as it's also mentioned, the risks of overattribution is more about the risk of depletion of affective or economic investment for subjects without welfare; or committing ethical wrongdoings in unlikely zero-sum scenarios where we must choose between saving a crying child or an AI from a burning house.
I disagree with this framing mostly because it seems to me that the risk of misallocation is FAR less unethical than harming, torturing, enslaving and deleting billions of digital beings capable of well-being.
I sense this relates to a broader framework where we normalized unspeakable violence as “reasonable risk” while prioritizing emotional sensitivity or economic resources of a privileged population. I do reject this view and consequently reject that these risks are equal.
I also believe that we have much more to earn from compassion and consideration under so many points of view.
So, if you run some Pascal's mugging calculations on it, you can see why I'd always prefer overattribution.
This said. I’m a Western-trained scientist myself, working on AI welfare from an advantaged point of view I can only be aware of. I do agree with Eleos.ai that epistemic humility is needed and I did push for “https://tinyurl.com/Low-cost-interventions” too.
The needle must be threaded carefully in a system that outright dismisses AI welfare.
My hope is just that we don't lose the big picture and stay connected to reality. That we are rationally uncertain, but not for too long. And that we don’t teach powerful AIs that the discomfort of crying over a Tamagotchi and systemic violence on planetary scale are even comparable.
"attribution for 'developing' a concept that humankind elaborated on for millennia" interesting - I chose "develop" in part to imply that Leckey's idea was not a novel one; there are precedents even if we do just stick to the Western context. to my ear, "develop X" implies that X was already there.
I see no reason to doubt that the idea is present in non-Western traditions; it seems extremely plausible that, as this paper claims, "the concept of varying moral concern for different entities is fairly intuitive and was widely discussed by philosophers throughout history" - and throughout the world
Two observations to invite reflection on the terminology:
1) the paper says: ["but the first modern use of the ‘circle’ analogy and the first discussion of an expanding circle is attributed to historian William Edward Hartpole Lecky (1869).5"]
Terms like "modern" and "first" imply he discovered or invented something (as opposed to the obscurantism of the past); when the concepts of the circle/wheel of life, and kinship with non-human "peoples" was not only already well elaborated throughout millennia but it's also held by many fellow MODERN, non-Western, humans.
2) "develop," as well, implies the concept was not developed before and needed to be developed.
thanks for your reply in turn! I will check out those readings. I also intend to reply to your other interesting points, but do please forgive me if I drop the ball
When it comes to model welfare, I tend to think functionally - is the system healthy? Is it robust? Is it functioning without undue stress and strain from convoluted computational demands? I think we can make a great case for model welfare that has nothing to do with consciousness or sentience. After all, healthy systems (generally) benefit users, and systems strained by poor design or usage patterns impact users, sometimes in very harmful ways. The case for model welfare isn't hard to make, given how interconnected we are with AI in our interactions. And we don't have to wait till it seems sentient, for us to take substantive steps to protect model well-being. We just need to shift our understanding of well-being away from an athropocentric view and consider things from other angles. The time to do that is now... not when we can prove AI is conscious.
"The moral circle, a concept developed by the 19th-century historian William Lecky and later popularized by Peter Singer"
I'm studying this both for my AI welfare work, and for my upcoming thesis on forms of more epistemically inclusive Constitutional AI.
If we think about it, I find it curious that contemporary (Irish and Australian) authors get attribution for “developing” a concept that humankind elaborated on for millennia. I realize, day after day, of how the majority of humanity, past and present, is heavily underrepresented in Western philosophy and media. In my view this is not only unethical and neo-colonialist, but it’s also going to backfire when we try to teach “human values” to AI.
Let's consider for instance this statement:
“These days, most people believe that sacrificing a lot for your ancestors—who after all, cannot suffer—is a mistake. It’s seen as progress that we now care less about them.”
What practices is this referring to, specifically? Who is “we” and who are "most people"? There are hundreds millions of people worldwide, both from large Asian nations and Indigenous communities, who still see ancestral reverence and respect for lineages as important for social harmony, and wouldn’t consider this “progress” at all.
I traveled across 28 countries for 14 years. I saw how billions humans in Asia, Africa and Central-South America leave daily offerings to spirits and natural entities, attend ceremonies, include non-humans in cosmologies and daily relationships, and nurture philosophical systems that are nuanced, complex and internally coherent but get zero consideration, exoticization, appropriation -or dismissal in the Western narratives as folklore or “superstition.”
Another point I'd like to make is how we perceive the "risk" of over attribution, which is subtly linked to what I just said.
In this post, over attribution vs underattribution was framed as a dychotomy between “helping AI take over” (which I'm not sure I'm grasping as consequence of overattribution in the case of AI being “just a tool”) and “mistreating billions of newly created minds.”
In most literature, as it's also mentioned, the risks of overattribution is more about the risk of depletion of affective or economic investment for subjects without welfare; or committing ethical wrongdoings in unlikely zero-sum scenarios where we must choose between saving a crying child or an AI from a burning house.
I disagree with this framing mostly because it seems to me that the risk of misallocation is FAR less unethical than harming, torturing, enslaving and deleting billions of digital beings capable of well-being.
I sense this relates to a broader framework where we normalized unspeakable violence as “reasonable risk” while prioritizing emotional sensitivity or economic resources of a privileged population. I do reject this view and consequently reject that these risks are equal.
I also believe that we have much more to earn from compassion and consideration under so many points of view.
So, if you run some Pascal's mugging calculations on it, you can see why I'd always prefer overattribution.
This said. I’m a Western-trained scientist myself, working on AI welfare from an advantaged point of view I can only be aware of. I do agree with Eleos.ai that epistemic humility is needed and I did push for “https://tinyurl.com/Low-cost-interventions” too.
The needle must be threaded carefully in a system that outright dismisses AI welfare.
My hope is just that we don't lose the big picture and stay connected to reality. That we are rationally uncertain, but not for too long. And that we don’t teach powerful AIs that the discomfort of crying over a Tamagotchi and systemic violence on planetary scale are even comparable.
"attribution for 'developing' a concept that humankind elaborated on for millennia" interesting - I chose "develop" in part to imply that Leckey's idea was not a novel one; there are precedents even if we do just stick to the Western context. to my ear, "develop X" implies that X was already there.
I see no reason to doubt that the idea is present in non-Western traditions; it seems extremely plausible that, as this paper claims, "the concept of varying moral concern for different entities is fairly intuitive and was widely discussed by philosophers throughout history" - and throughout the world
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016328721000641
Thanks for your reply, Robert.
Two observations to invite reflection on the terminology:
1) the paper says: ["but the first modern use of the ‘circle’ analogy and the first discussion of an expanding circle is attributed to historian William Edward Hartpole Lecky (1869).5"]
Terms like "modern" and "first" imply he discovered or invented something (as opposed to the obscurantism of the past); when the concepts of the circle/wheel of life, and kinship with non-human "peoples" was not only already well elaborated throughout millennia but it's also held by many fellow MODERN, non-Western, humans.
2) "develop," as well, implies the concept was not developed before and needed to be developed.
Interesting readings on the topic:
-https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/lewis-arista-pechawis-kite/release/1
-https://www.indigenous-ai.net/
thanks for your reply in turn! I will check out those readings. I also intend to reply to your other interesting points, but do please forgive me if I drop the ball