Abstract
The ethical concerns regarding the successful development of an Artificial Intelligence have received a lot of attention lately. The idea is that even if we have good reason to believe that it is very unlikely, the mere possibility of an AI causing extreme human suffering is important enough to warrant serious consideration. Others look at this problem from the opposite perspective, namely that of the AI itself. Here the idea is that even if we have good reason to believe that it is very unlikely, the mere possibility of humanity causing extreme suffering to an AI is important enough to warrant serious consideration. This paper starts from the observation that both concerns rely on problematic philosophical assumptions. Rather than tackling these assumptions directly, it proceeds to present an argument that if one takes these assumptions seriously, then one has a moral obligation to advocate for a ban on the development of a conscious AI.
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The Center for Human-Compatible AI, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, OpenAI, the Future of Humanity Institute, and the Foundational Research Institute, to name just a few. Of course these institutes do not focus exclusively on the long-term existential risks posed by AI, but also on the abundant more concrete risks that current AI already poses.
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The original mentions a lion, rather than an AI. (Wittgenstein 1953, p. 223).
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In the case of AI systems, it might even be that a group of agents could easily merge into a single agent. For sake of simplicity, we leave this speculative possibility aside.
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See the papers cited above for many more interesting examples.
- 5.
Metzinger also makes this point, and adds that anti-natalism regarding artificial life is far more plausible than its biological counterpart (Metzinger 2013, 2017). To avoid unnecessary complication, we make clear that we need not get into the issue of abortion, but are talking simply about preventing the act of human fertilization in the first place.
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- 7.
Humanity here refers to current humanity. If at some point in the future we discover a method of working on the development of a conscious AI that is certain to avoid supersuffering, then obviously this conclusion could be retracted. For now, however, we are just as far removed from the discovery of such a method as we are of the discovery of a conscious AI itself.
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The author gratefully acknowledges financial support from the ERC-2013-CoG project REINS, nr. 616512.
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Beckers, S. (2018). AAAI: An Argument Against Artificial Intelligence. In: Müller, V. (eds) Philosophy and Theory of Artificial Intelligence 2017. PT-AI 2017. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 44. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96448-5_25
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