{"id":206394,"date":"2025-02-14T00:08:00","date_gmt":"2025-02-14T06:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/02\/if-we-want-artificial-superintelligence-it-may-need-to-feel-pain"},"modified":"2025-02-14T00:08:00","modified_gmt":"2025-02-14T06:08:00","slug":"if-we-want-artificial-superintelligence-it-may-need-to-feel-pain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/02\/if-we-want-artificial-superintelligence-it-may-need-to-feel-pain","title":{"rendered":"If we want artificial \u201csuperintelligence,\u201d it may need to feel pain"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/if-we-want-artificial-superintelligence-it-may-need-to-feel-pain.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt might be that to get superhuman intelligence, you do need some level of sentience. We can\u2019t rule that out either; it\u2019s entirely possible. Some people argue that that kind of <em>real<\/em> intelligence requires sentience and that sentience requires embodiment. Now, there is a view in philosophy, called computational functionalism, that [argues] sentience, sapience, and selfhood could just be the computations they perform rather than the body they\u2019re situated in. And if that view is correct, then it\u2019s entirely possible that by recreating the computations the brain performs in AI systems, we also thereby recreate the sentience as well.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Birch is saying three things here. First, it\u2019s reasonable to suggest that \u201csuperintelligence\u201d requires sentience. Second, we could potentially recreate sentience in AI with certain computations. Therefore, if we want AI to reach \u201csuperintelligence\u201d we would need it to be sentient. We would need AI to feel things. ChatGPT needs to know pain. Gemini needs to experience euphoria.<\/p>\n<p>The fact that underlies Birch\u2019s book and our conversation is that intelligence is not some <em>deus ex machina<\/em> dropped from the sky. It is not some curious alien artifact uncovered in a long, lost tomb. It\u2019s nested within an unfathomably long evolutionary chain. It\u2019s the latest word in a long sentence. But the question Birch raises is: Where does AI fit in the book of evolved intelligence?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cIt might be that to get superhuman intelligence, you do need some level of sentience. We can\u2019t rule that out either; it\u2019s entirely possible. Some people argue that that kind of real intelligence requires sentience and that sentience requires embodiment. Now, there is a view in philosophy, called computational functionalism, that [argues] sentience, sapience, and [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-206394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206394","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\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206394"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206394\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}