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Artificial sentience - 80,000 Hours

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Working on this problem could be among the best ways of improving the long-term future, but we know of fewer high-impact opportunities to work on this issue than on our top priority problems. Exploratory Table of Contents AI systems in the future may be moral patients — that is, they could deserve moral consideration for their own sake. Why? The biggest reason we’re concerned about this is because they could become sentient — and so feel conscious pleasure, suffering, or other good and bad feelings. If so, then we will need to ensure that the future goes well not only for humans and animals, but for AI systems themselves. Mistreating sentient systems or allowing them to suffer — whether intentionally or accidentally, perhaps because we don’t know that they are sentient — could be a moral catastrophe, analogous to factory farming, but on a potentially much larger scale. Whereas AI alignment and AI governance work seeks to ensure that the development of AI benefits humanity, work on arti

Moral status of digital minds | 80,000 Hours Search for: On this page: Introduction 1 Why might understanding the moral status of digital minds be an especially pressing problem? 1.1 1. Humanity may soon grapple with many AI systems that could be conscious 1.2 2. Creating digital minds could go very badly — or very well 1.3 3. We don’t know how to assess the moral status of AI systems 1.4 4. The scale of this issue might be enormous 1.5 5. Work on this problem is neglected but seems tractable 1.6 Summing up so far 2 Arguments against the moral status of digital minds as a pressing proble

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