CONCEPT
AI Ethics Under Phi-Based Moral Status
The <em>ethical framework</em> that emerges when moral status is grounded in integrated information — a framework that demands measurement before moral judgment, and that reveals both the emptiness of current AI and the stakes of future architectures.
If consciousness is the foundation of moral status — the position Bentham articulated and the tradition has largely accepted — then IIT transforms AI ethics from a domain of speculation to a domain of (in principle) measurement. The ethical implications of phi-based moral status are both liberating and terrifying. Liberating: current AI systems, with their near-zero phi, have no moral status grounded in consciousness, freeing us from the paralyzing guilt that might attend routine treatment of them as tools. Terrifying: the possibility of being wrong, and the further possibility that future architectures could achieve high phi — creating genuine moral patients in silicon form, with all the obligations that follow.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Jeremy Bentham's 1789 reformulation of moral status — 'The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?' — shifted the foundation of moral consideration from cognitive capability to phenomenal experience. IIT transforms Bentham's