Jack Clark: commitment

Transcript context

…You can be more polite than I am. That’s fine. [laughs] Well, no. How I would phrase this is that I agonize about this. You read my newsletter. I write fictional stories in it often, which are me grappling with this question. I worry that we are going to be bystanders to what in the future will seem like a great crime, which is something about these things being determined to be conscious and us taking actions which you think are bad to have taken against conscious entities. Internally, I say, there’s a difference between doing experiments on potatoes and on monkeys. I think we’re still in the potato regime, but I think that there is actually a clear line by which these things become monkeys and then beyond in terms of your moral relationship to them. To Hinton’s point, I think that these things are conscious in the sense that a tongue without a brain is conscious. It takes actions in response to stimuli that are really, really, really complicated. In a moment, it has a sense impression of the world and is responding, but does it have a sense of self? I would wager, no, it doesn’t seem like it does. These AI systems — we instantiate them, and they live in a kind of infinite now where they may perceive, and they may have some awareness within a context window, but there’s no memory or permanence. To me, it feels like they’re on a trajectory heading towards consciousness, and if they’re conscious today, it’s in a form that we would recognize as like a truly alien consciousness, not human consciousness. In what year do you think you’ll be able to speak directly to a dolphin, and it will talk back? With a translator, of course.…

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