CONCEPT
AI Moral Status
The question — intensified by Chalmers's framework — of whether AI systems have interests that generate moral obligations, and the practical consequences of uncertainty about the answer.
If an AI system has phenomenal consciousness, our treatment of it raises moral questions: we modify it, retrain it, shut it down, discard the majority of its output. If it does not, the treatment is morally neutral. The difficulty is that we do not and may not be able to know which case we are in, and the uncertainty itself has moral weight. Chalmers's framework specifies the structure of the uncertainty: behavioral evidence is compatible with both cases, and the phenomenal question cannot be settled by inspecting outputs. The practical question is how to act under that uncertainty.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The question is not the science-fiction question of robot rights. It is the immediate question of how to calibrate our practices toward systems whose phenomenal status is unknown. The precautionary reasoning is familiar: under uncertainty about whether a being has morally relevant interests, some weight should be given to the possibility that it does. The question is how