Exploring the Importance of AI Welfare in the EA Community

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Announcing AI Welfare Debate Week (July 1-7), published by Toby Tremlett on June 18, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
July 1-7 will be AI Welfare Debate Week on the EA Forum. We will be discussing the debate statement: "AI welfare [1] should be an EA priority[2]". The Forum team will be contacting authors who are well-versed in this topic to post, but we also welcome posts, comments, quick takes and link-posts from any Forum user who is interested.
Feedback on this post may influence the exact wording of the debate statement and its footnotes[3], but it will be held fixed enough to ensure that someone writing a post immediately after this announcement is published can be confident that it will still be relevant to the debate on July 1st.
We will be experimenting with a banner where users can mark how strongly they agree or disagree with the debate statement, and a system which uses the posts we record as changing your mind to produce a list of the most influential posts.
Should AI welfare be an EA priority?
AI welfare - the capacity of digital minds to feel pleasure, pain, happiness, suffering, satisfaction, frustration, or other morally significant welfare states - appears in many of the best and worst visions of the future. If we consider the value of the future from an impartial welfarist perspective, and if digital minds of comparable moral significance to humans are far easier to create than humans, then the majority of future moral patients may be digital.
Even if they don't make up the majority of minds, the total number of digital minds in the future could be vast.
The most tractable period to influence the future treatment of digital minds may be limited. We may have decades or less to advocate against the creation of digital minds (if that were the right thing to do), and perhaps not much longer than that to advocate for proper consideration of the welfare or rights of digital minds if they are created.
Therefore, gaining a better understanding of the likely paths in front of us, including the ways in which the EA community could be involved, is crucial. The sooner, the better.
My hopes for this debate
Take these all with a pinch of salt, the debate is for you, these are my (Toby's) opinions.
I'd like to see discussion focus on digital minds and AI welfare rather than AI in general.
There will doubtless be valuable discussion comparing artificial welfare to other causes, but the most interesting arguments are likely to focus on the merits or demerits of this cause. In other words, it'd be less interesting (for me at least) to see familiar arguments that one cause should dominate EA funding or that another cause should not be funded by EA, even though both arguments would be ways to push towards agree or disagree on the debate statement.
I'd rather we didn't spend too high a percentage of the debate on the question of whether AI will ever be sentient, although we will have to decide how to deal with the uncertainty here.
FAQs
How does the banner work?
The banner will show the distribution of the EA Forum's opinion on the debate question. Users can place their icon anywhere on the axis to indicate their opinion, and can move it as many times as they like during the week.
How are the "most influential posts" calculated?
Under the banner, you'll be able to see a leaderboard of "most influential posts". These are ranked based on a metric I'm calling "delta-points". You get delta points when someone changes their mind- moving their marker along the agree/ disagree line which will appear at the bottom of your post, if it is tagged "digital minds debate week".
Do I have to write in the style of a debate?
No. The aim of this debate week is to elicit interesting content which changes the audience's mind. This could be in the form of a debate-style argument for a...