{"id":168793,"date":"2023-08-01T02:22:50","date_gmt":"2023-08-01T07:22:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/08\/how-studying-animal-sentience-could-help-solve-the-ethical-puzzle-of-sentient-ai"},"modified":"2023-08-01T02:22:50","modified_gmt":"2023-08-01T07:22:50","slug":"how-studying-animal-sentience-could-help-solve-the-ethical-puzzle-of-sentient-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/08\/how-studying-animal-sentience-could-help-solve-the-ethical-puzzle-of-sentient-ai","title":{"rendered":"How Studying Animal Sentience Could Help Solve the Ethical Puzzle of Sentient AI"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/how-studying-animal-sentience-could-help-solve-the-ethical-puzzle-of-sentient-ai2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>As ive said before we should at least attempt to reverse engineer brains of: mice, lab rats, crows, octupi, pigs, chimps, and end on the\u2026 human brain. it would be messy and expensive, and animal activsts would be runnin around it.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>Lurking just below the surface of these concerns is the question of machine consciousness. Even if there is \u201cnobody home\u201d inside today\u2019s AIs, some researchers wonder if they may one day exhibit a glimmer of consciousness\u2014or more. If that happens, it will raise a slew of moral and ethical concerns, says <a href=\"https:\/\/personal.lse.ac.uk\/birchj1\/\">Jonathan Birch<\/a>, a professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics and Political Science.<\/p>\n<p>As AI technology leaps forward, ethical questions sparked by human-AI interactions have taken on new urgency. \u201cWe don\u2019t know whether to bring them into our moral circle, or exclude them,\u201d said Birch. \u201cWe don\u2019t know what the consequences will be. And I take that seriously as a genuine risk that we should start talking about. Not really because I think <a href=\"https:\/\/undark.org\/2023\/01\/07\/interview-a-conversation-on-truth-and-fiction-with-chatgpt\/\">ChatGPT<\/a> is in that category, but because I don\u2019t know what\u2019s going to happen in the next 10 or 20 years.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In the meantime, he says, we might do well to study other non-human minds\u2014like those of animals. Birch leads the university\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.lse.ac.uk\/cpnss\/research\/ASENT\">Foundations of Animal Sentience project<\/a>, a European Union-funded effort that \u201caims to try to make some progress on the big questions of animal sentience,\u201d as Birch put it. \u201cHow do we develop better methods for studying the conscious experiences of animals scientifically? And how can we put the emerging science of animal sentience to work, to design better policies, laws, and ways of caring for animals?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As ive said before we should at least attempt to reverse engineer brains of: mice, lab rats, crows, octupi, pigs, chimps, and end on the\u2026 human brain. it would be messy and expensive, and animal activsts would be runnin around it. Lurking just below the surface of these concerns is the question of machine consciousness. [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":359,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,15,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-168793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethics","category-habitats","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/359"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168793"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168793\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}