It will not, however, automatically become part of the patient’s electronic medical record. If you respond to incentives, it makes sense to hold you to the demands of morality in the sense that we should punish you for bad behavior and reward you for good behavior, since this will improve your future behavior. It will collaborate extensively with partners to deliver new value propositions integrated seamlessly across journeys, technology platforms, and data sets. Balancing high-tech innovation with human-centered thinking is an ideal method for producing responsible AI technology and ensuring the future of AI remains hopeful for the next generation. So although I don’t think current ML systems are likely to be conscious, I don’t see overwhelming reasons to think that future ML systems couldn’t one day be conscious, or even that they couldn’t one day be as conscious as present-day humans. One might worry that if future ML systems are punishable in a more robust sense, humans should be punished less for the misdeeds of the systems they create. Having said all this, I do think ML systems as a group have much more potential for consciousness in the future than plants or bivalves do. How much effort did they put into improving the behavior of the entity insofar as it was within their power, again either directly or by affecting its dispositions?
But I think future ML research based on the foundation of neural networks could result in systems with much more of the architectural, behavioral, and cognitive correlates of consciousness than we see today. Theory of mind is a type of AI that does not actually exist yet, but it describes the idea of an AI system that can perceive and understand human emotions, and then use that information to predict future actions and make decisions on its own. But it seems to me that if we think a non-biological system fully representing the computational structure of a human brain can be conscious, we also have evidence that a system implementing very similar but distict computations can also be conscious. Consciousness is a fascinating property in its own right, and it would be a pretty big deal if humans could one day bring into existence non-biological consciousness. But helping one group doesn’t need to come at the expense of others. We also don’t have any reason to think one of them has more moral agency than the other. Most people don’t think current ML systems are conscious, and consciousness is clearly not sufficient for moral agency in this stronger sense.
What about stronger notions of moral agency? What about moral agency? The weakest notions of moral agency only require something like being responsive to positive and negative incentives. And whatever properties we think makes humans interesting or deserving of moral status, they must be something other than phenomenal consciousness. Artificial intelligence is computer software that mimics how humans think in order to perform tasks such as reasoning, learning, and analyzing information. To advance equity and civil rights, consistent with the directives of Executive Order 14091, and in addition to complying with the guidance on Federal Government use of AI issued pursuant to section 10.1(b) of this order, agencies shall use their respective civil rights and civil liberties offices and authorities – as appropriate and consistent with applicable law – to prevent and address unlawful discrimination and other harms that result from uses of AI in Federal Government programs and benefits administration. We punish adult humans when they harm others, but we don’t punish rocks or ladders for causing similar harms. But I would like to live in a world where, over time, we have more evidence grounding the probabilities we assign to where we are on the scale of “we’re doing no harm” to “we’re doing harm equivalent to swatting a fly” to “we’re doing harm equivalent to a large but humane mouse experiment” to “we’re doing harm equivalent to a single factory farm” to “our RL agents are sentient and we’ve been torturing them for thousands of years”.
When we fail to treat moral patients as moral patients, we can do significant harm by dismissing their suffering. We might think both drivers have moral responsibility for their own personal decision to drive drunk, but the companies are responsible for their own role in bringing about the outcome. We might absolve Company B or wrondoing in this case, or we might decide to punish Company B even if we think the outcome was the result of bad luck, but we would probably want to be harsher with the more negligent Company A than with Company B. Importantly, we would want to punish Company A even if we think the driver is a moral agent that should also be punished. In this case, it’s clear that Company A acted far worse than Company B. Company A was negligent in a way that made the outcome almost inevitable, whereas Company B tried to do everything in its power to make such an outcome highly unlikely. My problem right now is finding a good way to represent piece movements so that it can be recycled. Machines being far better suited to humans than this work, the focus was on training machines to do this in as “smart” a way as is possible.