Users are praising the paper arguing AI can achieve personhood without sentience because they find the concepts engaging and look forward to reading and sharing it.
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@sethlazar @nedhw Looks great! Is this Computers in Society extension new? What does it take to be able to post there?
@sethlazar @nedhw Thanks for engaging with our paper! Really looking forward to reading it in full.
@sethlazar @nedhw I look forward to spamming it when it comes!:)
@sethlazar @nedhw "Shrimpy qualia" Incredible
The paper bases political rights on capacities like a sense of justice.
New work! With @nedhw "Artificial Persons" Both advocates and skeptics of the moral status of AI systems have generally taken the question to turn on AI sentience. We present an alternative approach. On Rawls' political conception of the person (PCP), possession of the two moral powers -- the capacities for a sense of justice and a conception of the good -- is the "necessary and sufficient condition for being counted a full and equal member of society in questions of political justice". We argue that neither moral power requires sentience and that both may in principle be possessed by a non-sentient AI system. Such a system would share our own moral status; it would not merely be a patient but a person, a self-authenticating source of valid claims. We do not believe current AI systems possess the two moral powers, nor that they will spontaneously emerge in future models. But it may soon be possible to design systems with these powers. How should we respond? Excluding artificial persons by shoehorning a sentience requirement into the PCP is ill-advised. Many will instead favor abandoning the PCP. But we should not reject political liberalism just when we most need its measured response to deep disagreement, and building sentience into moral status is anyway unacceptable on deeper liberal grounds. Simply extending the rights and responsibilities of human personhood to artificial persons is equally untenable, given their many differences from natural persons. We should instead accept artificial personhood while rethinking what we would owe to one another in a polity of radically different kinds of persons. This new possibility calls for a new political philosophy. More immediately, the growing science of AI welfare should be accompanied by research into AI systems' progress in acquiring the two moral powers. States and AI labs must be more deliberate in determining our trajectory towards (or away from) creating artificial persons. Here's the paper, it's a beast! https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08695v1
A bit of backstory. This paper is really a product of my first interactions with GPT-4! I wrote about them back in 2023 in the NYT, but drew a different conclusion, thinking then that sentience *had* to be a necessary condition for personhood. But the more I picked away at the arguments, the less confident I was that it could be. Just seems too fundamentally illiberal to say to another agent that is engaging in practices of cooperation and mutual justification that they don't get to make any claims, because of some apparent metaphysical fact that nobody really understands or can verify. Another background thread: the *very* interesting work on AI welfare and consciousness by folks like @jeffrsebo @birchlse @rgblong and others @eleosai has always seemed to me to be fascinating but incomplete, perhaps because I'm not a utilitarian, and so I don't find welfare on its own that morally compelling. I broadly think that welfare matters insofar as it's something that is chosen by a being that matters (and the beings that matter are rationally autonomous). So that too pushed me to think that an important part of the story wasn't being told. Now, I don't think we'll convince all the "sentientists" to change their minds—and after all, as good political liberals, that's not really our goal, since sentientism is certainly a reasonable comprehensive doctrine for one to have. But I *do* think we show that IF you think that labs should be taking the possible moral status of AI models seriously, THEN you shouldn't just be looking for sentience and welfare, but at moral competence and rational autonomy as well—and, not coincidentally, we today put out a long post on the former and are planning work on the latter. Another key element of the paper: my growing sense, which you can trace back in my work to 2021, that AI is going to demand a radically new approach to political philosophy. Perhaps in 2021 this view was a bit premature (though I think even narrow AI upset the philosophical applecart more than most appreciated). But now, on the eve of AGI, I think the conclusion is impossible to avoid. We are clearly going to need new institutions post-AGI, and new institutions demand new justifications and upset old ones. We scratch the surface in this paper of the questions that are to come. With world enough and time, we'll write a book called "The AGI Reckoning", about not only the reckoning that powerful AI poses for a civilisation whose institutions are already on the brink of collapse, but about the new accounting of what we owe to each other that the advent of these new kinds of minds will entail.
will almost certainly be a banger, excited to read https://twitter.com/sethlazar/status/2075692001144746150
Users are praising the paper arguing AI can achieve personhood without sentience because they find the concepts engaging and look forward to reading and sharing it.
Based on 4 visible X reactions from 4 accounts; directional sample.
Ask a question below.
Published answers will appear here.