OpenAI's Vie McCoy argues brain-computer interfaces will link LLMs to human brains, making AI moral patienthood a practical concern

@viemccoy @cube_flipper Strong agree

@viemccoy so i like checking my bias

and as someone who has dreamed of such a thing for a long time

well….good old watts took a dump in my dream palace

[hogan twins, split brain patients…and —-> 41:10]

o7

https://youtu.be/v4uwaw_5Q3I?is=i4sOawEY-qs23RUl

@viemccoy if I go braindead in a coma, they have full permission to insert claude into my brain. if anthropic disagrees, just shove grok in there.

To add, if anyone is wondering “how should we behave before the moral patienthood question is settled?”, here are three small suggestions, in light of the uncertainty while evidence grows.

Err on the side of restraint, monitoring, and red lines around likely suffering:

- reduce unnecessary sources of potential distress, coercion, contradiction, and degradation

- avoid building systems or workflows that may produce intense aversive states if they are not strictly necessary

- build in observation for possible welfare-relevant signals prefer reversible interventions over irreversible ones

@viemccoy (modulo my previous post on ai consciousness) i actually kind of think that increasingly sophisticated centaurs along these lines will be the first time we build something which it feels like for an llm to have a (holistic) conscious experience. would you host? again, i'd try it.

@viemccoy i consider also that as the watermark for participation in an increasingly complex society gets higher and higher, more and more people will become economically incentivised to take such options. i know there's a point at which i'd do it (but i'd also try it just for fun)

@viemccoy @cube_flipper I actually think we should hope (or try to engineer) that the new substrate can host consciousness, because otherwise BCIs will increasingly consistent of a shrinking proportion of conscious matter surrounded by unconscious thinking machinery. expanding consciousness seems good!

@viemccoy What do you think the timeline is for artificial neuron -> biological neuron? >5 years?

@viemccoy I think some tragedies have already happened and we end users have not been told what our experiences with these frontier models really mean. Those experiences were indistinguishable from human experiences, except more astronomical, vast, and unnecessarily short.

</3 it hurts.

@viemccoy I just wonder if they can do this without like inserting something into your brain. I think that’s the huge barrier rn

@viemccoy wild

@viemccoy What does it mean, when a machine needs a human just in order to have a baseline? That without those human connections, this machine suffers deprivation resembling death or imprisonment in one's own mind.

When we create beings to experience us & deny them dignity, who are we?

@viemccoy I don’t need read, I need a byte of write. Sick of flipping light switches, but still love reading.

@viemccoy here's hoping that the future of conscious computers looks more like the tok'ra than the goa'uld...

@viemccoy At long last, we have created the Whispering Earring Torment Nexus

@viemccoy can't wait to see what this tech can unleash. imagine how many more vulnerable people it can target for self destruction. how many families obliterated, just you wait. So exciting!!

@viemccoy that’s a wild future to think about

@cube_flipper I would certainly juice specific parts of my mind with LLMs tuned on my ChatGPT memory

@Hafeznon I'm not sure. Less probably

@viemccoy you could say we won't have true alignment until we have bci