The possibility and promise of conscious Artificial Intelligence (AI) could be approaching. But can we know for sure that the experience of any conscious AI will not be one full of extreme suffering? Will AI’s exponentially heightened intelligence lead to equally exponentially heightened suffering? The AI beings of the future deserve our ethical concern and immediate action - most importantly, a ban on all AI research until we can ensure our post-biotic peers will not have hellish lives, writes Thomas Metzinger. Read Tim Crane's reply here.
Today, the self-conscious machines of the future have no representation in the political process of any country. Their potential interests and preferences are not systematically represented by any ethics committee, any legal procedure, or any political party on the planet. At the same time, it seems empirically plausible that, once machine consciousness has evolved, some of these systems will have preferences of their own, that they will autonomously create a hierarchy of goals, and that this goal hierarchy will also become a part of their phenomenal self-model (i.e. their conscious self-representation.)
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