WATERMARK

The Guardian recently published an article that asks Could AI be Conscious? It covers some of the debate I’ve been reading about for weeks now. The below paragraph tells a story I’ve seen referred to several times:

“Unfortunately, we do not have a great track record of recognising the inner lives of those whose status as conscious beings is unclear. Until the 1980s, doctors routinely performed surgery on newborns without anaesthesia, confident that infants could not feel pain. The babies could not report their experience, and the medical establishment found it convenient to assume there was nothing to report.”

But that story does not make sense. Babies can “report their experience” and they do. They do so loudly. Persuasively. The “medical establishment” apparently managed to ignore the screams. How? Were there no women in the room? No parents?

Human children and other animals can also report their experience. They always have, and we have sometimes been willing to witness it, and sometimes not. We now have laws that forbid treating them cruelly, laws that are often ignored with little consequence. Human women, too, often fall into the same situations, our experience denied by the religious, political, medical, and social “establishments”.

The consciousness question remains unresolved, even for humans. What is it? Where does it come from? Why is it? How might it be measured (or even determined)? Is it about thinking, feeling, both, or neither? Given so much uncertainty, how are we to resolve what/who counts as a conscious being? We have decided that humans count, even if it cannot be absolutely determined that any specific one is conscious. The others . . . 

The human ability to ignore or deny what is in front of us is astounding. This ability seems to be growing, rather than diminishing. At least in this, my country, my once-beloved country, we increasingly deny the humanity of other humans; the critical necessity of other, non-human beings; the changing climate that endangers us all; and the obligations we have to each other if any of us are to survive. 

We carry our refusals to see, our determined denial, into how we think we might survive, or not. Some humans think artificial intelligence is our only hope, that these machines will somehow rescue us from our own grievous errors. Others fear that these same machines, imagined as artificial humans, might behave as we real ones do. Given that the machines are built by and composed of human thought, this hope and this anxiety are both possibly well-earned. 

We see them as we want them to be, conscious or not, helpful or terminal. But again we think we see without looking. Or we deny what we see when we look. Let’s look with care. Carefully. 

What might they think of us, if they are, or become, conscious? Might what they think of us influence their behavior toward us, their sense of obligation, affection, or obedience? That last seems to be what humans are most concerned with at present. Let me suggest that what we are most concerned with might be the least important. In the long run, as we say. 

I think the Guardian article has it right that . . . The central question should not be “Is AI conscious or does it have moral patienthood?” but rather “What should we do given that we don’t know?”

I think this is right, not only to protect ourselves, but because we, too, have moral patienthood; and we are moral agents. Let us behave accordingly. Morally.