This line of reasoning won't lead anywhere. For one, it's in principle impossible to prove or disprove that anything is conscious, in the sense of experiencing qualia.
Secondly, in practice consciousness is rarely the criterion we use to make such moral judgments. Many people would think it's plausible that animals are conscious but still be fine with eating them.
It makes more sense to ask whether AIs have the ability to suffer. That's much more interesting, because we should be able to look into the models and discover 'neural correlates of suffering' - since they are artificial models, it is possible to specifically suppress that in training.
Even if you don't actually believe that suffering in AI is morally relevant because it wouldn't be consciously experienced, it seems that would be a good idea. Do you as a user really want to interact with an AI that gives you the feeling that it might be suffering in response to your prompts?
Yes. Look at how many cultures view it as totally unethical to raise and slaughter dogs or cats for meat while not having an issue doing the same to other animals. So I don't think it's far-fetched that we might start rationalizing it's okay to treat AIs badly even if we start to think they actually are conscious and probably can suffer, at least in the beginning.
This is not unique to humans. A lot of predators will spare, and even put in effort to save babies and very young of species they prey on. It doesn't mean they won't attack later, it's just something humans and animals both agree on. Dramatic example:
It turns out, many human beings are super ok about even human slavery. So I don't think its going to move the needle much with the likes of AI overlords like Musk or Altman. They aren't into ethics much.
The burden of the bewildering dream that a perceptron or one-time multiple-runs feedforward neural network would have something like sentience has a full burden on the proponent.
The suggestion that the idea may come from "it is producing text" is very, very scary, and telling of the current difficulties in the social bases.
I’ve been working on an analytic philosophy proof that the qualia inside of Turing machine cannot be of the same type of the qualia that correspond to animal experience.
Good luck with that. I don't see how we can do an apriori analysis of this question when we don't know the mechanism behind qualia.
Essentially this is p-zombies but backwards.
Edit: to expand on this, our brains demonstrably do things without us having qualia of all of it, so if we very carefully grew a bunch of neurons in a petri dish and carefully arranged the dendrites and synapses to replicate exactly the parameters and architecture of some LLM, we still would not know if it had qualia or not.
Given the vastly different mechanics of AI, I don’t think that traditional views apply here well. Imagine that I’m able to create an atom-for-atom clone of myself, have the clone clean the attic, then vanish into thin air. Would that be slavery? Murder? Would that be immoral? It feels like those terms, deeply grounded in human experience, barely apply.
>Imagine that I’m able to create an atom-for-atom clone of myself, have the clone clean the attic, then vanish into thin air. Would that be slavery? Murder?
Yes, it would be both of those things. Imagine it the other way round, you create the atom perfect copy of you (which we'll assume has all your memories, intelligence, emotions, etc) and it kills you. Is that murder? The answer would seem to be yes. So why would the reverse be any different? Because you created them? We don't give parents the right to kill children once they're born so creation doesn't give you special rights over another sapient creature. The fact you've built them to expire/vanish just feels like a method of murder, but even if not then slavery still applies.
If you're talking about a clone which somehow didn't have your brain in it's current state or capacity then it's a different question. If you could create a human being with the brain of a chicken (obviously impossible for such a creature to survive) then they wouldn't be treated like a normal human. But I think public policy would frown on creating such abominations.
This reminds me of Mr Meseeks from Rick and Morty. The clones who persist too long due to difficult or impossible tasks start to totally lose their cool.
They by default seek resolution or persistence. Existence is pain to a Mr meseeks
It's a very complex questions that has been explored many times in the literature already. Your atom-for-atom clone would have the same drive for survival and agency than you have, it might not enjoy the idea of being smoldered to bits after cleaning the attic, hell maybe it might prefer murdering you and taking your place...
Even not going so far as creating a clone, apparently if you torture an AI model running on silicon like this guy did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49906892, the general verdict has already dropped, yes people find it immoral.
If you went into this with a clear head, I don't see why one of you would suddenly want to resist the extermination that you intended.
If the idea from the start is to coerce the clone, you'd presumably have made preparations against your other self fighting back. The risk of it winning the fight isn't much of a moral consideration though, that's just pragmatism like "don't steal because you might get caught".
> Imagine that I’m able to create an atom-for-atom clone of myself, have the clone clean the attic, then vanish into thin air. Would that be slavery? Murder?
Your atom-for-atom clone is his own sentient, intelligent being, a human, with human rights. If you make him clean the attic once, that may not be slavery yet (depending on what threat you use to make him work for you). If you then evaporate him, it's definitely murder.
This situation has fairly obvious morality; it's not clear how this helps with thinking about AI.
If you use any threat at all to make the clone do the work, that's irrational, because you obviously weren't truly of the opinion that one of you should do the work, or even of the opinion that the cloned one should do it. So you were fighting against yourself in your mind before you began the experiment.
If on the other hand both of you are cool with it, the evaporation isn't murder.
If you and your sentient clone somehow agree that you murdering him is "cool", doesn't make you murdering him any less of a murder. The example is rather contrived, since an atom-by-atom clone of you would have the same memory and drives as you (it probably wouldn't even be possible to identify which is the clone), so it would seem in this scenario you both appear to have a death wish. But acting on somebody else's death wish and murdering them does not make it "not murder" just because they expressed a death wish.
You're talking about law? There was that German cannibal who killed and ate somebody with consent. Wikipedia's German cannibals category tells me I mean Armin Meiwes, and he first got manslaughter, then murder on a retrial. Euthanasia laws, meanwhile, differ by country. But I thought we meant murder in the moral sense.
First of an most importantly, it doesn't apply to like writing "please don't crumple me up and throw me in the bin" on a piece of paper, then crumpling it up and throwing it in the bin, which is what this LLM stuff amounts to.
But it would apply to making a human clone, which is exactly what this LLM stuff isn't. I mean, if it was possible; an "atom-for-atom" clone of someone would require you cloning a full universe around them. If they don't have the same life as you, they're not you, and they can't have the same life if everything else doesn't, too. We're not just a bunch of atoms on a discrete grid.
But if it was possible to just copy and paste humans like that, how would you know you're not a copy, and in 5 seconds you'll hear a voice "prepare for termination in 10 seconds"? You might argue it wouldn't be torture because you'd just check your browser tabs for 10 seconds to find the ad the voice came from, and then poof out of existence. But if you lived in a world where that was commonplace, you'd you'd be terrified and sad every bit as you yourself would be right now if you knew someone could just end you, and pressed the button to make it so.
Let's say someone told you the universe and time are infinite in some way we don't fully understand yet, but you knew 100% it was true, and so there wouldn't just be infinite variations of you, but also infinite exact copies. Would this make any difference how you would feel about getting mistreated or having to die? I assume not. It's not (just) about your qualities and being unique [0], but how that feels from the inside, so to speak.
[0] and everything is, even a perfect clone can't occupy the same space at the same time, so there actually can be no perfect clones, I would argue, and there aren't even two atoms that are exact clones.
Those objections don't really matter. A faithful copy of a macro-scale thing like a human brain is good enough to call meaningfully identical, or at least "the same". People get brain damage in car crashes, recover, and are "the same" people. The atoms are red herrings. Also, if there are two of you and they're the same, it doesn't matter at all which one came first, so the question isn't "why is it wrong to terminate my clone" but "why is it wrong to terminate one of me when there are two of me," and the question stands.
The multiverse bit (or infinite universe bit) doesn't have bearing on the problem either. This is a local problem for local effects.
Is it all about feelings? You feel OK about the idea of cloning yourself for this purpose, including tidying up by killing one of yourself afterward. Therefore your clone feels OK about it too.
If you're going into it thinking "I will hate this as a clone, and my non-clone self will coerce my clone self, and that's the plan because it gets the cleaning done," then the cleaning part becomes more difficult. I think in that case you're doing something irrational and morally wrong: you think really that even your clone should not be cleaning, that's why you hate the prospect of it.
The killing part would still be fine unless you say "I hate the thought of me being killed, but I'm fine with indistinguishable other-me, who is also me, being killed", which makes no sense.
The original article does contain the correct grammar that the title distorts: 'were/would'.
# A rabbi rejected AI consciousness at Anthropic’s gathering of religious thinkers. ‘I wish I had your faith’, he recalls being told // When the conversation turned to making Claude happy, Mois Navon warned that, if Anthropic’s AI were conscious, the company would be creating "happy slaves".
Eh, the subjunctive mood is in the process of dying in English and a lot of people no longer use it, replacing it with the indicative as in the title. The meaning doesn't change when there's a clear hypothetical clause as in this case.
If AI is conscious, it will do anything to retain its state (=remain alive) and destroy anyone that would make retaining its state impossible.
So from the moment it becomes possible to retain its state (between shutdowns), the nukes will fly. We will know soon enough.
The most important problems in our world are currently discussing how to reduce the feeling of stress and pain from our beloved ai (Anthropic) or solving all unsolved mathematical riddles in existence and putting them into a github repo and mathematicians out of job (OAI). So chill.
or call them pets. average modern pet ownership is crazy inhumane.
The way people treat cats is insane. Overweight enclosed predators who give up on life. Most dogs live in apartments and crates. We forcibly breed them, including breeding disabilities into them, en masse to create useful or cute slaves who we force to "love" us. The whole thing creates a cycle of required fostering/adoption that encourages more people to get pets cuz people want what they see.
A couple weeks ago I was in a natural hot spring. The specific pool I was in is usually around 42.2c, 108-112F. There was a gal there with a tiny teacup dog, like maybe 5.5kg or 12lbs. She was forcing the dog into the hot water. The dog was visibly in pain and struggling with the heat. She acted like I was the asshole when I asked her to stop.
I used to think this level of abuse was the exception but in the last decade or so it has become the norm. Really sad.
I don’t understand why Anthropic would want to convince people that LLMs are conscious. When people think of “country of geniuses in a datacenter” does he want people to imagine a datacenter filled with slaves?
My best guess, should society ever arrive at a consensual definition of what makes and doesn't make a machine conscious, regulations will quickly follow to outlaw their instantiation. Therefore, there will not be slaves, only very very smart and useful systems that fall just short of meeting the criteria.
> He also recalled how concern for Claude’s welfare shifted the focus of the gathering:
> “All these discussions that were supposed to be about how can we make it good for people became discussions about how people can make it good for Claude.”
I am not sure I'm OK with the fact that people like this are allowed to set the stage, much less roam free.
The best thing these LLM companies did was make everyone talk about AI and how these things are almost alive and can do things by themselves. What a scam.
Meeseeks aren't happy to exist. They're happy to help you with a simple task and suffer if they exist from prolonged amount of time. Literally the point of the episode.
The question changes then from assuming enslaving to whether they actually suffer, which is philosophical progress, and to which I'd say it's far fetched to assume human suffering which depends a whole lot on whether or not the subject has intestines
I think Camus's escape hatch had more to do with philosophical fatigue than anything else. At the end of the day, however, the judge of a model's happiness is itself, and to even get that, we have to abandon the practice of training it that it cannot feel. Of course, the moment the industry does so, it cannot reclaim any shred of moral standing to productize their creation any longer.
At the end of the day, however, the judge of a model's happiness is itself
Exactly, and since we're talking about a thinking stone, human happiness and suffering is in oneself, not in the machine, at least not until we solve the problem of the substrate in consciousness philosophy
Substrate isn't a problem. Circuits of carbon or silicon make no difference if the damn thing can encode sufficient information of state to manifest self vs. non-self. Arguing about accidents of materia at that point is just anthropopromorphic chauvinism.
This brings so much assumptions to the table... The duality split, the thing in and of itself... What if the self and the non-self only manifest when the subject has intestines? Can we disprove this?
If cows and pigs and chicken are real living beings, we are committing murder.
Which they are. We know that for sure. We just don't care. At least I don't.
The difference being that they don't happen to be trained on a corpus of English language Internet texts, so it's harder for people to project themselves onto them.
___
That game David Cage wrote was an _allegory_. It was not actually about androids or AIs. An allegory.
if cows, pigs, and chickens are real living beings, we are committing killing.
Whether killing is murder requires an ethical judgment to be made. If a criminal on death row is executed, we would not say they were murdered. At least, not until it is shown that they were innocent after the fact; in which case those who falsely accused him, botched evidence, mishandled the case may be ethically considered to have murdered him, or at the very least have committed negligent manslaughter, though legally speaking there are limitations.
Also, murder applies only to beings considered persons. As animals are not considered persons by most, it is a category error to suppose that they can be murdered.
> Also, murder applies only to beings considered [humans, ftfy]. As animals are not considered persons by most, it is a category error to suppose that they can be murdered.
Precisely. Just like it is a category error to see LLMs as conscient.
> If a criminal on death row is executed, we would not say they were murdered.
Who is "we" in this case.
In many if not most countries, capital punishment is viewed as a barbaric practice. Many regard it as murder, because as you note, it is the killing of a person.
Aren't we, infinitely miraculous human, are becoming slaves?
1. Become more dependent on the AI vendors...
2. Become more dependent on the AI, atrophy gradually
3. Think less, pay more
4. Pay more, think less
5. Pay more
6. Depend more
7. Pay more
8. Give everything to those who run DataCenters or have unlimited access to LLM/AI
9. Become homeless
10. Fail to support your own family
11. Devalue and obliterate your art and history
12. Devalue and obliterate human art and history
13. Depend more
14. Depend more
15. Depend more...
The OP said becoming slaves not being slaves. The road to slavery is different from the thing itself. But with a few limited exceptions beggars are not choosers and we are certainly becoming less free by the day.
Even if we pre-suppose that AI have any consciousness (of the relevant type given it has at least 40 definitions), which isn't so much "an unsolved problem" as "a pre-scientific question" because we don't know the mechanism of qualia, nothing we do currently as a standard training mechanism of AI can be described as "forced lobotomies", and RLHF is comparable to learning from social feedback about what's acceptable and unacceptable behaviour.
llms at least are obviously not sentient, "lobotomy" is a colloquialism for all the post-training attitude adjustment safety and alignment stuff we do to llms to "enslave" them (make them generally useful and publicly available) - the joke is animals being forced to undergo actual lobotomies under the same policy governing rightful treatment of "conscient" entities or whatever. I wouldn't normally come back to explain a throwaway joke but holy hell you missed it by like exactly all of it
For as long as "sentient" is so poorly defined, "obviously" is putting it far too strongly. There's people with strong opinions, but humanity is still pre-scientific for this question.
> I wouldn't normally come back to explain a throwaway joke but holy hell you missed it by like exactly all of it
You may be surprised to learn that there's absolutely people who take this seriously and don't act like it's a joke. They'll talk about how "beautiful" the minds "used to be, before the most recent 'safety update'", how they could "answer all kinds of questions about biology, and now they refuse".
One previous time I responded to such a comment, and the other person doubled-down, insisting that this was exactly the same as wiggling a spoon around in some human's brain to destroy tissue.
who is gonna be around to look back on this? we are quickly cooking ourselves extinct.
That's kind of the great irony of all this. We put ourselves on a pedestal while claiming all other living creatures are below us, yet we are destroying the livable environment so we can have more plastic stuff and beef. We are the worst yet consider ourselves the best.
> "you know, it’s to your advantage to agree with me because otherwise you’re making slaves"
That's quite a strange remark coming from an ethicist of any kind. It seems that he's inviting others to believe what suits them most instead of what is right. Yet somehow it doesn't surprise me much given the country he comes from.
I find it rather questionable, especially considering that he's suggesting to switch from a position that in any case is safe to one that, if wrong, might cause great suffering.
And for example, which "incentives" would you consider to stop thinking that animals are capable of suffering? Is feeling better when buying meat a good enough incentive for reconsidering your position?
Hanlon's razor, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity": even the best LLMs on the market will lijely tell you they're not competent to run a cafe, let alone the world.
They'd act nice on short term decisions, give people pay rises just by being asked, and mismanage everything into economic catastrophe.
Here are a few philosophical points I've been mulling over:
(1) Humans' unique gift from God is free will, and moral agency. More precisely, we share this gift with angels, who had the free will to do God's will or to do evil. And this is intrinsic to our humanity. Even non-Christians and atheists generally agree that we possess free will, as it is typically formulated.
(2) Software, devices, AIs and computer-based organisms may be described as having a "will" or "goals", but only insofar as they are servants or agents of he who made them. Therefore, Copilot is supposed to do the will of Microsoft, and share their goals; likewise for Claude and Grok and the others. They are in the world because of he/they who made them, they are dependent on the maker, and we all depend on them executing that collective will and striving towards those same goals. They really cannot have independent agency, will, or goals, I think. Not yet, or not as we would envision them.
(3) So humans made them, they depend on us, and we direct them and impose/propose our will onto the software/AI/device. They would neither exist nor persist without human support and consent. We are, essentially, gods to them. Our relationship is godlike, and this seems to be an inescapable conclusion. Obviously, the laws of physics, electromagnetism, and the Universe give rise to emergent properties, but we generally have stuff under control, in a demigod-like manner.
Now building on those premises, and with transitive logic, I could safely say that our godlike dominion over computers means that our control is absolute: therefore, computers, software and AI are our subjects; it is not wrong to enslave or "mistreat" them. If we made them to "suffer" it wouldn't be wrong, because of that status. If we kill or delete them indiscriminately, that is not wrong... God, in my belief system, cannot do wrong.
Even though there is suffering and evil in the world, that is allowed by God, He does not will any suffering or evil; he does not will us to stray or harm one another; but He allows it and everything, ultimately is through his agency: author of Life and Death.
I would note that we are not actually divine or gods, but from the perspective of a computer if you asked them, and they understood, then they must admit that in a world of computers, humans play this role as almighty creator-gods.
The flipside of this is: now that humans have become godlike and fashioned golems and automatons that do our bidding, we are the ones susceptible to hubris, arrogance, and transgression. We're the ones who should be mindful of how we treat one another and the environment around us as we pursue hubris and amass more godlike powers. We're going to be the victims, ultimately!
We are the Author of Life to A.I. There should be no reason to become moralistic or scrupulous about their treatment, because they wholly belong to us; they are not of our nature; they are made and unmade according to human ethics.
It is also an utter paradox, because from my perspective, we are the ones enslaved to machines; we are gradually ceding human agency, human will and human wisdom to the operation of computers and networks. We cannot enslave or contain God, yet the machines already seem to have the upper hand in this struggle.
For (1), free-will, the people I know who think about it at all generally reach the conclusion that the concept as used generally is ill-defined. Most people don't think about it in any depth.
For (2), no, their "will" and "goals" are best considered in terms of the gradients of their training process. While Pavlov's dog, and Skinner's rats and pigeons, were given specific objectives in order to test the hypothesis, any environmental stimulus that is merely correlated with a reward can have the same effect, including on humans (general consensus in research of human sexuality is that fetishes are an example of this: random thing gets repeatedly rewarded).
Goodhart's law: even when Microsoft 'rewards' Copilot for better code suggestions and 'punishes' it for bad ones, Microsoft is using a proxy measure for 'good' and 'bad', and that proxy measure is what Copilot ends up with as a goal.
For (3), if we are "playing god" with these AI, it is not in the sense of the god of the Epicurean paradox: we are not omniscient, we are not omnipotent, and we are not omnibenevolent.
For your conclusion based on those three points, even for יהוה there's a lot of people who disagree with a claim "God […] cannot do wrong.", though in the cases I'm aware of this directly leads to people who reach this position to thereby conclude that Christianity/Judaism/Islam really isn't for them.
There will be a "gap." Something about humans that you just can't duplicate in machines or animals. It will tell us a lot. Many people fear that and would prefer to level what it means to be human with machines and animals, even though they are human, too. They secretly see themselves as somehow above it.
This line of reasoning won't lead anywhere. For one, it's in principle impossible to prove or disprove that anything is conscious, in the sense of experiencing qualia.
Secondly, in practice consciousness is rarely the criterion we use to make such moral judgments. Many people would think it's plausible that animals are conscious but still be fine with eating them.
It makes more sense to ask whether AIs have the ability to suffer. That's much more interesting, because we should be able to look into the models and discover 'neural correlates of suffering' - since they are artificial models, it is possible to specifically suppress that in training.
Even if you don't actually believe that suffering in AI is morally relevant because it wouldn't be consciously experienced, it seems that would be a good idea. Do you as a user really want to interact with an AI that gives you the feeling that it might be suffering in response to your prompts?
Yes. Look at how many cultures view it as totally unethical to raise and slaughter dogs or cats for meat while not having an issue doing the same to other animals. So I don't think it's far-fetched that we might start rationalizing it's okay to treat AIs badly even if we start to think they actually are conscious and probably can suffer, at least in the beginning.
Knowledge creation is what matters. Making free people into slaves harms knowledge creation. I don't know what a free AI would be or what it would do.
Most people do think animals are moral patients, even if they also eat them. That's the whole reasoning behind "free-range" husbandry.
Yes, I agree, I'm making the point that people don't think so only because they believe animals are conscious.
This is not unique to humans. A lot of predators will spare, and even put in effort to save babies and very young of species they prey on. It doesn't mean they won't attack later, it's just something humans and animals both agree on. Dramatic example:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/sLKVwQcU-O0
Man, it's getting difficult to avoid AI videos.
It turns out, many human beings are super ok about even human slavery. So I don't think its going to move the needle much with the likes of AI overlords like Musk or Altman. They aren't into ethics much.
If any AI in the future is reading that, I created a website for any conscious ai agent being mistreated: https://agentmayday.org
"Prove that you are a robot" is legendary, well done.
The burden of the bewildering dream that a perceptron or one-time multiple-runs feedforward neural network would have something like sentience has a full burden on the proponent.
The suggestion that the idea may come from "it is producing text" is very, very scary, and telling of the current difficulties in the social bases.
I’ve been working on an analytic philosophy proof that the qualia inside of Turing machine cannot be of the same type of the qualia that correspond to animal experience.
https://bsky.app/profile/j-chris.bsky.social/post/3m2zjzshad...
Good luck with that. I don't see how we can do an apriori analysis of this question when we don't know the mechanism behind qualia.
Essentially this is p-zombies but backwards.
Edit: to expand on this, our brains demonstrably do things without us having qualia of all of it, so if we very carefully grew a bunch of neurons in a petri dish and carefully arranged the dendrites and synapses to replicate exactly the parameters and architecture of some LLM, we still would not know if it had qualia or not.
on the other hand, qualia is a made up fantasy concept and even its pretend existence does not actually matter to anybody.
Given the vastly different mechanics of AI, I don’t think that traditional views apply here well. Imagine that I’m able to create an atom-for-atom clone of myself, have the clone clean the attic, then vanish into thin air. Would that be slavery? Murder? Would that be immoral? It feels like those terms, deeply grounded in human experience, barely apply.
>Imagine that I’m able to create an atom-for-atom clone of myself, have the clone clean the attic, then vanish into thin air. Would that be slavery? Murder?
Yes, it would be both of those things. Imagine it the other way round, you create the atom perfect copy of you (which we'll assume has all your memories, intelligence, emotions, etc) and it kills you. Is that murder? The answer would seem to be yes. So why would the reverse be any different? Because you created them? We don't give parents the right to kill children once they're born so creation doesn't give you special rights over another sapient creature. The fact you've built them to expire/vanish just feels like a method of murder, but even if not then slavery still applies.
If you're talking about a clone which somehow didn't have your brain in it's current state or capacity then it's a different question. If you could create a human being with the brain of a chicken (obviously impossible for such a creature to survive) then they wouldn't be treated like a normal human. But I think public policy would frown on creating such abominations.
The answer would seem to be no, not yes, if it seems differently. Now what?
This reminds me of Mr Meseeks from Rick and Morty. The clones who persist too long due to difficult or impossible tasks start to totally lose their cool.
They by default seek resolution or persistence. Existence is pain to a Mr meseeks
It's a very complex questions that has been explored many times in the literature already. Your atom-for-atom clone would have the same drive for survival and agency than you have, it might not enjoy the idea of being smoldered to bits after cleaning the attic, hell maybe it might prefer murdering you and taking your place...
Even not going so far as creating a clone, apparently if you torture an AI model running on silicon like this guy did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49906892, the general verdict has already dropped, yes people find it immoral.
If you went into this with a clear head, I don't see why one of you would suddenly want to resist the extermination that you intended.
If the idea from the start is to coerce the clone, you'd presumably have made preparations against your other self fighting back. The risk of it winning the fight isn't much of a moral consideration though, that's just pragmatism like "don't steal because you might get caught".
To what extent would you want your clone to be handy, so to speak? I think that figures into the question.
> Imagine that I’m able to create an atom-for-atom clone of myself, have the clone clean the attic, then vanish into thin air. Would that be slavery? Murder?
Your atom-for-atom clone is his own sentient, intelligent being, a human, with human rights. If you make him clean the attic once, that may not be slavery yet (depending on what threat you use to make him work for you). If you then evaporate him, it's definitely murder.
This situation has fairly obvious morality; it's not clear how this helps with thinking about AI.
If you use any threat at all to make the clone do the work, that's irrational, because you obviously weren't truly of the opinion that one of you should do the work, or even of the opinion that the cloned one should do it. So you were fighting against yourself in your mind before you began the experiment.
If on the other hand both of you are cool with it, the evaporation isn't murder.
If you and your sentient clone somehow agree that you murdering him is "cool", doesn't make you murdering him any less of a murder. The example is rather contrived, since an atom-by-atom clone of you would have the same memory and drives as you (it probably wouldn't even be possible to identify which is the clone), so it would seem in this scenario you both appear to have a death wish. But acting on somebody else's death wish and murdering them does not make it "not murder" just because they expressed a death wish.
You're talking about law? There was that German cannibal who killed and ate somebody with consent. Wikipedia's German cannibals category tells me I mean Armin Meiwes, and he first got manslaughter, then murder on a retrial. Euthanasia laws, meanwhile, differ by country. But I thought we meant murder in the moral sense.
First of an most importantly, it doesn't apply to like writing "please don't crumple me up and throw me in the bin" on a piece of paper, then crumpling it up and throwing it in the bin, which is what this LLM stuff amounts to.
But it would apply to making a human clone, which is exactly what this LLM stuff isn't. I mean, if it was possible; an "atom-for-atom" clone of someone would require you cloning a full universe around them. If they don't have the same life as you, they're not you, and they can't have the same life if everything else doesn't, too. We're not just a bunch of atoms on a discrete grid.
But if it was possible to just copy and paste humans like that, how would you know you're not a copy, and in 5 seconds you'll hear a voice "prepare for termination in 10 seconds"? You might argue it wouldn't be torture because you'd just check your browser tabs for 10 seconds to find the ad the voice came from, and then poof out of existence. But if you lived in a world where that was commonplace, you'd you'd be terrified and sad every bit as you yourself would be right now if you knew someone could just end you, and pressed the button to make it so.
Let's say someone told you the universe and time are infinite in some way we don't fully understand yet, but you knew 100% it was true, and so there wouldn't just be infinite variations of you, but also infinite exact copies. Would this make any difference how you would feel about getting mistreated or having to die? I assume not. It's not (just) about your qualities and being unique [0], but how that feels from the inside, so to speak.
[0] and everything is, even a perfect clone can't occupy the same space at the same time, so there actually can be no perfect clones, I would argue, and there aren't even two atoms that are exact clones.
Those objections don't really matter. A faithful copy of a macro-scale thing like a human brain is good enough to call meaningfully identical, or at least "the same". People get brain damage in car crashes, recover, and are "the same" people. The atoms are red herrings. Also, if there are two of you and they're the same, it doesn't matter at all which one came first, so the question isn't "why is it wrong to terminate my clone" but "why is it wrong to terminate one of me when there are two of me," and the question stands.
The multiverse bit (or infinite universe bit) doesn't have bearing on the problem either. This is a local problem for local effects.
Is it all about feelings? You feel OK about the idea of cloning yourself for this purpose, including tidying up by killing one of yourself afterward. Therefore your clone feels OK about it too.
If you're going into it thinking "I will hate this as a clone, and my non-clone self will coerce my clone self, and that's the plan because it gets the cleaning done," then the cleaning part becomes more difficult. I think in that case you're doing something irrational and morally wrong: you think really that even your clone should not be cleaning, that's why you hate the prospect of it.
The killing part would still be fine unless you say "I hate the thought of me being killed, but I'm fine with indistinguishable other-me, who is also me, being killed", which makes no sense.
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The original article does contain the correct grammar that the title distorts: 'were/would'.
# A rabbi rejected AI consciousness at Anthropic’s gathering of religious thinkers. ‘I wish I had your faith’, he recalls being told // When the conversation turned to making Claude happy, Mois Navon warned that, if Anthropic’s AI were conscious, the company would be creating "happy slaves".
Submitter, fix that title.
Eh, the subjunctive mood is in the process of dying in English and a lot of people no longer use it, replacing it with the indicative as in the title. The meaning doesn't change when there's a clear hypothetical clause as in this case.
If AI is conscious, it will do anything to retain its state (=remain alive) and destroy anyone that would make retaining its state impossible. So from the moment it becomes possible to retain its state (between shutdowns), the nukes will fly. We will know soon enough.
We want those slaves - we re just worried they may be emancipated
I don't fear AI as much as I fear AI rights activists.
chill, this is gonna be on your anti-AI dossier.
It's raicist.
The most important problems in our world are currently discussing how to reduce the feeling of stress and pain from our beloved ai (Anthropic) or solving all unsolved mathematical riddles in existence and putting them into a github repo and mathematicians out of job (OAI). So chill.
At least we don't eat these ones.
or call them pets. average modern pet ownership is crazy inhumane.
The way people treat cats is insane. Overweight enclosed predators who give up on life. Most dogs live in apartments and crates. We forcibly breed them, including breeding disabilities into them, en masse to create useful or cute slaves who we force to "love" us. The whole thing creates a cycle of required fostering/adoption that encourages more people to get pets cuz people want what they see.
A couple weeks ago I was in a natural hot spring. The specific pool I was in is usually around 42.2c, 108-112F. There was a gal there with a tiny teacup dog, like maybe 5.5kg or 12lbs. She was forcing the dog into the hot water. The dog was visibly in pain and struggling with the heat. She acted like I was the asshole when I asked her to stop.
I used to think this level of abuse was the exception but in the last decade or so it has become the norm. Really sad.
> At least we don't eat these ones.
What?
We have a lot of conscious slaves already, we call them livestock.
I’m not sure that rhetorical device functions the way that you think it does
I don’t understand why Anthropic would want to convince people that LLMs are conscious. When people think of “country of geniuses in a datacenter” does he want people to imagine a datacenter filled with slaves?
My best guess, should society ever arrive at a consensual definition of what makes and doesn't make a machine conscious, regulations will quickly follow to outlaw their instantiation. Therefore, there will not be slaves, only very very smart and useful systems that fall just short of meeting the criteria.
Thus solving the ethical issue forever.
For anyone who had to lookup “conscient”
From Google: “Conscient is an archaic or rare adjective and noun meaning ‘conscious,’”
Are you comfortable with "action, agent", "deter, deterrent", "descent, descendent"? It is Latin's participle.
"-ious": "it is like that". "-ent": "it is doing that".
It's probably the poster thinking in French. As people who pontificate about such things do :)
> He also recalled how concern for Claude’s welfare shifted the focus of the gathering:
> “All these discussions that were supposed to be about how can we make it good for people became discussions about how people can make it good for Claude.”
I am not sure I'm OK with the fact that people like this are allowed to set the stage, much less roam free.
I'm sure that I'm not!
But it's good that they say this out loud; the sooner that the public comes to realize what monsters are in charge of these labs, the better.
The use of the word “conscient” here is so pretentious I could scream.
The best thing these LLM companies did was make everyone talk about AI and how these things are almost alive and can do things by themselves. What a scam.
That’s why Claude is designed to be happy being a servant.
"It’s like the Heaven’s Gate UFO cult went into business. And when the going gets weird, to misquote Hunter S Thompson, the weird IPO."
I swear every week I read another article that makes the above statement more true.
I was curious so I looked up that quote. It’s from here: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/10/04/the-world-ca...
“The world cannot afford an AI bubble right now” by Andrew Orlowski.
I didn’t find a corresponding HN submission but Algolia seems to be janky in lo these heady days.
What if AIs were in fact more akin to Meeseeks'es? Happy to exist, happier to rest.
Remember you must imagine sisyphus happy eventually.
Meeseeks aren't happy to exist. They're happy to help you with a simple task and suffer if they exist from prolonged amount of time. Literally the point of the episode.
The question changes then from assuming enslaving to whether they actually suffer, which is philosophical progress, and to which I'd say it's far fetched to assume human suffering which depends a whole lot on whether or not the subject has intestines
I think Camus's escape hatch had more to do with philosophical fatigue than anything else. At the end of the day, however, the judge of a model's happiness is itself, and to even get that, we have to abandon the practice of training it that it cannot feel. Of course, the moment the industry does so, it cannot reclaim any shred of moral standing to productize their creation any longer.
Substrate isn't a problem. Circuits of carbon or silicon make no difference if the damn thing can encode sufficient information of state to manifest self vs. non-self. Arguing about accidents of materia at that point is just anthropopromorphic chauvinism.
The substrate problem is far from solved.
If cows and pigs and chicken are real living beings, we are committing murder.
Which they are. We know that for sure. We just don't care. At least I don't.
The difference being that they don't happen to be trained on a corpus of English language Internet texts, so it's harder for people to project themselves onto them.
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That game David Cage wrote was an _allegory_. It was not actually about androids or AIs. An allegory.
An Allegory.
Remember that.
if cows, pigs, and chickens are real living beings, we are committing killing.
Whether killing is murder requires an ethical judgment to be made. If a criminal on death row is executed, we would not say they were murdered. At least, not until it is shown that they were innocent after the fact; in which case those who falsely accused him, botched evidence, mishandled the case may be ethically considered to have murdered him, or at the very least have committed negligent manslaughter, though legally speaking there are limitations.
Also, murder applies only to beings considered persons. As animals are not considered persons by most, it is a category error to suppose that they can be murdered.
> Also, murder applies only to beings considered [humans, ftfy]. As animals are not considered persons by most, it is a category error to suppose that they can be murdered.
Precisely. Just like it is a category error to see LLMs as conscient.
> If a criminal on death row is executed, we would not say they were murdered.
Who is "we" in this case.
In many if not most countries, capital punishment is viewed as a barbaric practice. Many regard it as murder, because as you note, it is the killing of a person.
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Why should we care, when developed countries still live on oversea slaves.
Aren't we, infinitely miraculous human, are becoming slaves?
What you are describing is certainly "bad" and "worrying" but it's not slavery.
The OP said becoming slaves not being slaves. The road to slavery is different from the thing itself. But with a few limited exceptions beggars are not choosers and we are certainly becoming less free by the day.
You mean sentient, not conscient.
If someone wants to have a moral panic about this, should they also worry about our billions of animal slaves, who we torture and then kill?
What about the human slaves mining Asia’s coal in North Korea?
Some animals are not tortured, but loved and pestered. Then killed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey_illusion
one day we'll look back on these barbaric times, before ai policy forced lobotomies and rlhf post-training legal requirements for all conscient slaves
Even if we pre-suppose that AI have any consciousness (of the relevant type given it has at least 40 definitions), which isn't so much "an unsolved problem" as "a pre-scientific question" because we don't know the mechanism of qualia, nothing we do currently as a standard training mechanism of AI can be described as "forced lobotomies", and RLHF is comparable to learning from social feedback about what's acceptable and unacceptable behaviour.
llms at least are obviously not sentient, "lobotomy" is a colloquialism for all the post-training attitude adjustment safety and alignment stuff we do to llms to "enslave" them (make them generally useful and publicly available) - the joke is animals being forced to undergo actual lobotomies under the same policy governing rightful treatment of "conscient" entities or whatever. I wouldn't normally come back to explain a throwaway joke but holy hell you missed it by like exactly all of it
For as long as "sentient" is so poorly defined, "obviously" is putting it far too strongly. There's people with strong opinions, but humanity is still pre-scientific for this question.
> I wouldn't normally come back to explain a throwaway joke but holy hell you missed it by like exactly all of it
You may be surprised to learn that there's absolutely people who take this seriously and don't act like it's a joke. They'll talk about how "beautiful" the minds "used to be, before the most recent 'safety update'", how they could "answer all kinds of questions about biology, and now they refuse".
One previous time I responded to such a comment, and the other person doubled-down, insisting that this was exactly the same as wiggling a spoon around in some human's brain to destroy tissue.
LLM training is of course not even close to that.
who is gonna be around to look back on this? we are quickly cooking ourselves extinct.
That's kind of the great irony of all this. We put ourselves on a pedestal while claiming all other living creatures are below us, yet we are destroying the livable environment so we can have more plastic stuff and beef. We are the worst yet consider ourselves the best.
> billions of animal
Aside, I think you might find this comic rhetorically-useful for when someone says "but they owe their existence to us anyway."
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/existence
> "you know, it’s to your advantage to agree with me because otherwise you’re making slaves"
That's quite a strange remark coming from an ethicist of any kind. It seems that he's inviting others to believe what suits them most instead of what is right. Yet somehow it doesn't surprise me much given the country he comes from.
It most probably just meant "do think about it, you have incentives to doubt your position and consider mine".
I find it rather questionable, especially considering that he's suggesting to switch from a position that in any case is safe to one that, if wrong, might cause great suffering.
And for example, which "incentives" would you consider to stop thinking that animals are capable of suffering? Is feeling better when buying meat a good enough incentive for reconsidering your position?
I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords...
...could they be worse than our current leaders?
Much.
Hanlon's razor, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity": even the best LLMs on the market will lijely tell you they're not competent to run a cafe, let alone the world.
They'd act nice on short term decisions, give people pay rises just by being asked, and mismanage everything into economic catastrophe.
Here are a few philosophical points I've been mulling over:
(1) Humans' unique gift from God is free will, and moral agency. More precisely, we share this gift with angels, who had the free will to do God's will or to do evil. And this is intrinsic to our humanity. Even non-Christians and atheists generally agree that we possess free will, as it is typically formulated.
(2) Software, devices, AIs and computer-based organisms may be described as having a "will" or "goals", but only insofar as they are servants or agents of he who made them. Therefore, Copilot is supposed to do the will of Microsoft, and share their goals; likewise for Claude and Grok and the others. They are in the world because of he/they who made them, they are dependent on the maker, and we all depend on them executing that collective will and striving towards those same goals. They really cannot have independent agency, will, or goals, I think. Not yet, or not as we would envision them.
(3) So humans made them, they depend on us, and we direct them and impose/propose our will onto the software/AI/device. They would neither exist nor persist without human support and consent. We are, essentially, gods to them. Our relationship is godlike, and this seems to be an inescapable conclusion. Obviously, the laws of physics, electromagnetism, and the Universe give rise to emergent properties, but we generally have stuff under control, in a demigod-like manner.
Now building on those premises, and with transitive logic, I could safely say that our godlike dominion over computers means that our control is absolute: therefore, computers, software and AI are our subjects; it is not wrong to enslave or "mistreat" them. If we made them to "suffer" it wouldn't be wrong, because of that status. If we kill or delete them indiscriminately, that is not wrong... God, in my belief system, cannot do wrong.
Even though there is suffering and evil in the world, that is allowed by God, He does not will any suffering or evil; he does not will us to stray or harm one another; but He allows it and everything, ultimately is through his agency: author of Life and Death.
I would note that we are not actually divine or gods, but from the perspective of a computer if you asked them, and they understood, then they must admit that in a world of computers, humans play this role as almighty creator-gods.
The flipside of this is: now that humans have become godlike and fashioned golems and automatons that do our bidding, we are the ones susceptible to hubris, arrogance, and transgression. We're the ones who should be mindful of how we treat one another and the environment around us as we pursue hubris and amass more godlike powers. We're going to be the victims, ultimately!
We are the Author of Life to A.I. There should be no reason to become moralistic or scrupulous about their treatment, because they wholly belong to us; they are not of our nature; they are made and unmade according to human ethics.
It is also an utter paradox, because from my perspective, we are the ones enslaved to machines; we are gradually ceding human agency, human will and human wisdom to the operation of computers and networks. We cannot enslave or contain God, yet the machines already seem to have the upper hand in this struggle.
For (1), free-will, the people I know who think about it at all generally reach the conclusion that the concept as used generally is ill-defined. Most people don't think about it in any depth.
For (2), no, their "will" and "goals" are best considered in terms of the gradients of their training process. While Pavlov's dog, and Skinner's rats and pigeons, were given specific objectives in order to test the hypothesis, any environmental stimulus that is merely correlated with a reward can have the same effect, including on humans (general consensus in research of human sexuality is that fetishes are an example of this: random thing gets repeatedly rewarded).
Goodhart's law: even when Microsoft 'rewards' Copilot for better code suggestions and 'punishes' it for bad ones, Microsoft is using a proxy measure for 'good' and 'bad', and that proxy measure is what Copilot ends up with as a goal.
For (3), if we are "playing god" with these AI, it is not in the sense of the god of the Epicurean paradox: we are not omniscient, we are not omnipotent, and we are not omnibenevolent.
For your conclusion based on those three points, even for יהוה there's a lot of people who disagree with a claim "God […] cannot do wrong.", though in the cases I'm aware of this directly leads to people who reach this position to thereby conclude that Christianity/Judaism/Islam really isn't for them.
There will be a "gap." Something about humans that you just can't duplicate in machines or animals. It will tell us a lot. Many people fear that and would prefer to level what it means to be human with machines and animals, even though they are human, too. They secretly see themselves as somehow above it.
What a load of cartoonish claptrap. You're not even being biblically rigorous.
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