Intro

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: Will disagreement about AI rights lead to societal conflict?, published by Lucius Caviola on July 3, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
Summary:
Digital sentience might be on the horizon, bringing with it an inevitable debate and significant risks.
Philosophers research whether AIs can be sentient and should deserve protection. Yet, ultimately, what matters most is what key decision-makers and the general public will think.
People will disagree on whether AIs are sentient and what types of rights they deserve (e.g., harm protection, autonomy, voting rights).
Some might form strong emotional bonds with human-like AIs, driving a push to grant them rights, while others will view this as too costly or risky.
Given the high stakes and wide scope of disagreement, national and even global conflicts are a possibility.
We must navigate a delicate balance: not granting AIs sufficient rights could lead to immense digital suffering, while granting them rights too hastily could lead to human disempowerment.
The arrival of (potentially) sentient AIs
We could soon have sentient AI systems - AIs with subjective experience including feelings such as pain and pleasure. At least, some people will claim that AIs have become sentient. And some will argue that sentient AIs deserve certain rights. But how will this debate go? How many will accept that AIs are sentient and deserve rights? Could disagreement lead to conflict?
In this post, I explore the dynamics, motives, disagreement points, and failure modes of the upcoming AI rights debate. I also discuss what we can do to prepare.
Multiple failure modes
In this post, I focus in particular on how society could disagree about AI rights. For context, the most obvious risks regarding our handling of digital sentience are the following two (cf. Schwitzgebel, 2023).
First, there is a risk that we might deny AIs sufficient rights (or AI welfare protections) indefinitely, potentially causing them immense suffering. If you believe digital suffering is both possible and morally concerning, this could be a monumental ethical disaster. Given the potential to create billions or even trillions of AIs, the resulting suffering could exceed all the suffering humans have caused throughout history.
Additionally, depending on your moral perspective, other significant ethical issues may arise, such as keeping AIs captive and preventing them from realizing their full potential.
Second, there is the opposite risk of granting AIs too many rights in an unreflective and reckless manner. One risk is wasting resources on AIs that people intuitively perceive as sentient even if they aren't. The severity of this waste depends on the quantity of resources and the duration of their misallocation. However, if the total amount of wasted resources is limited or the decision can be reversed, this risk is less severe than other possible outcomes.
A particularly tragic scenario would be if we created a sophisticated non-biological civilization that contained no sentience, i.e., a "
zombie universe" or "Disneyland with no children" (
Bostrom, 2014).
Another dangerous risk is hastily granting misaligned (or unethical) AIs certain rights, such as more autonomy, that could lead to an existential catastrophe. For example, uncontrolled misaligned AIs might disempower humanity in an undesirable way or lead to other forms of catastrophes (Carlsmith, 2022).
While some might believe it is desirable for value-aligned AIs to eventually replace humans, many take-over scenarios, including misaligned, involuntary, or violent ones, are generally considered undesirable.
As we can see, making a mistake either way would be bad, and there's no obvious safe option. So, we are forced to have a debate about AI rights and its associated risks. I expect this debate to come, potentially soon. It c...