Centerfield

Consciousness, Meat: All Good, and, And Future AI Ethics

This post is about realities and ethics of various intelligence levels. I've been meaning to write something like it a long time, but was reminded by reading Pollan's excellent The Omnivore's Dilemma, which includes bits about consciousness and ethics of eating.

Self-Consciousness

It's pretty obvious to me that at least some animals are both conscious and self-conscious. I have two cats. If you've ever known any cats well, you'll understand that they are utterly self-centered. To a cat, the world exists to serve her. I don't see how you can have self-centeredness without both self-consciousness and consciousness, by definition.

I also grant self-consciousness to any computer program that has a robust notion of self, which many AIs designed for conversation do. There's a famous, early AI program, Eliza, that emulates a psychotherapist. I don't see it as self-conscious, because its manipulations were purely grammatical. But, of course, where to draw the line will depend on taste.

Eating Ethics

Since reading a book that included eating ethics reminded me to write this post, I'll also go into why I think it's morally OK for us to eat Bevo The Steer. I do believe that our higher intelligence puts us into a different ethical category than animals that makes us more worthy of maintenance than the animals. Since at least one human on this earth can't thrive without meat (me) (yes, really and truly), I think it's ethical for us to eat meat.

Pollan wrote that he found convincing the vegetarianist advocate argument that we might as well eat the our retarded and disabled as eat animals. I find the argument unconvincing - even our retarded and disabled are far, far smarter than cows, horses, and chickens. The biggest reason, of course, is that the retarded and disabled have real hopes of cures.

We do, as I see it, owe respect to animals not to mistreat them. And, I hope we sometime have the technology to grow meat without brains. At that point, I will see eating the original stuff as unethical.

Future, Smart AI Ethics

When I was a kid, I used to see Isaac Asimov's books about intelligent robots as reasonable. These robots were restrained by limits in their basic programming to obey humans and not threaten them.

Now I see that as slavery.

That brings up the question of, how do you decide who should have human rights. If somebody's as smart in a general-purpose way as a human, why shouldn't he get human rights? To me, it's brains rather than looks that are the key to humanity.

After all, you find at least SOME blogposts (maybe not this one...) interesting strictly because what they say seems smart to you, or you wouldn't be here. If I had to interest readers on my looks, our ratings would plummet even farther.

So, why should we care about AI rights? Because most computer scientists think we're likely to eventually have created artificial intelligences at least at some point in the future, even if possibly remote. I think it's likely to be in the first half of this century. So, what should we do when we get there?