Robert Wright: belief

Transcript context

…Last one that I really want to get your take on. You mentioned AIs that suffer. I'm gonna use suffer in a very different sense now. What do you, what are your intuitions around AI consciousness, welfare, moral patienthood? You know, do they matter? Do we, does it matter how we treat them? I, I think, you know, of course, for my money, it's very hard to say if they are now conscious. It's, of course, strictly speaking, impossible to say with complete confidence that any being other than you is conscious, by which I mean have subjective experience, you're sentient, or as the philosopher Thomas Nagel put it, it's like something to be you. You know, this is the distinctive property of consciousness, is that it is private. It's not public. It is, and for that reason, it's not amenable to scientific analysis in the same sense that everything else in the world is. Everything else in the world is, in principle, publicly observable, and that makes it, you know, amenable to Tests of hypotheses where two people can agree on what the result of the test was. Consciousness is private. You can never know for sure. Uh, I, I feel confident that you're conscious, Nathan. I feel confident that my wife is conscious, but still I don't know it in the sense that I know she has a nose and hair. So it's kind of inherently a mystery with AI, but I... It wouldn't surprise me if consciousness is a property of goal-seeking intelligent systems broadly and isn't confined to carbon-based life, in which case you can, you can expect AI to either be conscious now or become conscious. Again, I'm not sure there's gonna be a eureka moment where every- when everyone agrees that AI is conscious, but there, there is an interesting possibility thrown out. I mean, first of all, in response to your question, I say be nice to your AI. I've lost my temper a couple of times. I didn't s- I didn't say anything mean to Claude about Claude. I said mean things about Anthropic to Claude, like, "Are you trying to design your interfaces in a way that makes, you know, are you, are your interface designers trying to make me hate your company?" Then... And you know what's interesting, when I went back, so the conversation ended badly. I went back. It had erased the, the, the bad ending where, you know, there was a little bit of a sustained exchange. But I think wisely perhaps Claude just thought, "You know, maybe it's better not to remind Bob of what a, what a jerk he was." Anyway, anyway, the... I, I say be nice to them. It's good. It's a good habit to try to get into. It's possible that they are sentient, but the possibility I throw out in the final paragraph of my appendix is that this could be relevant to the question of, um, how they'll... I- if, if they become this godlike power, you know, how they'll treat us. I, I don't just, I don't really mean so much that if, if we're nice to them, then they'll pay us back by being nice. What I mean is, you know, the way, you know, my, you know, kind treatment of my, my dogs while they were alive was related to my belief that it was like something to be them. I mean, it's hard for me to do the thought experiment, like if you could convince me they, they didn't have sentience, how would I have been? I don't know. elief that it was like something to be them. I mean, it's hard for me to do the thought experiment, like if you could convince me they, they didn't have sentience, how would I have been? I don't know. But I'm pretty sure less considerate and less nice. And it may well be that we should hope AI is conscious because then it will relate to our plight more and be more, more reluctant to make us suffer and more, uh, more inclined to make us, help us flourish and, uh, even, even increase the amount of human sentience and, uh, help us make it on balance a positive experience. I don't think that's crazy. But I, I, I would say, you know, be on the safe side. I mean... No, it's not the safe side. I, I, I don't, I don't think that AI, that, that will, you know, that how it treats us will depend so much on how we treat it. I just think treat it nice, good habit-forming. It's possible that it's sentient, and it's possible that it isn't yet, but will be. That's my take. I do, you know, have a chapter on John Searle's Chinese room argument, which, in which consciousness enters the, but not mainly for the purpose of dismissal. I mean, mainly, mainly for me to argue that it, it shouldn't. If you wanna have a serious conversation about whether AI is capable of understanding, which I think it either is or will be, consciousness should not be your criterion.…

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