Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Odd Lots Podcast.
Speaker 3: I'm Jill Wisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2: You know what I find kind of weird, Tracy.
Speaker 3: The list could be long.
Speaker 2: Joe the years twenty twenty five. Yes, and philosophers still
Speaker 2: don't have a good answer on the origin of consciousness.
Speaker 2: It's like, come on, what have you been doing all
Speaker 2: this time? It's like, how long are we going to
Speaker 2: keep funding these philosophy departments, et cetera. If they're still
Speaker 2: working on what, to my mind is that they should
Speaker 2: have solved it and move on, seriously, like get the
Speaker 2: answer already, where does consciousness come from? Then let's move on.
Speaker 2: I said, they're still arguing these what to my mind
Speaker 2: seem like very basic questions in philosophy, Like they're like,
Speaker 2: ask all the same stuff that they've been talking about forever.
Speaker 2: How to be a good person, what does it mean
Speaker 2: to have a moral way of life? Where does consciousness
Speaker 2: come from? Why do we have moral intuitions? Et cetera.
Speaker 2: It's like, move on, like get the answer.
Speaker 3: Wait if you want them to move on or get
Speaker 3: the answer.
Speaker 2: Get the answer. So that you can move on like
Speaker 2: they've been worried on to.
Speaker 3: What those are? Any questions, Joe, I know, move on.
Speaker 2: Like answer the questions already. It's like, you know, if
Speaker 2: like scientists were still debating like the speed of gravity
Speaker 2: or the speed of light, like they answered these questions
Speaker 2: and they moved on, and or do it work?
Speaker 3: You're out the foundational elements of what it means to
Speaker 3: be humans so that we can move on to more
Speaker 3: important things.
Speaker 2: Yes, or wrap it up as a field if after
Speaker 2: two thousand years of the existence of philosophy they're still
Speaker 2: working on these things, Like come on, I have.
Speaker 3: A sneaking suspicion that we're going to be asking some
Speaker 3: of these questions for a very long time. Joe, despite
Speaker 3: your frustration.
Speaker 2: The whole the whole field is fraudulent. That's what I
Speaker 2: was saying. No, no, I don't necessarily believe that, but
Speaker 2: it's like, all right, guys, let's move it on.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: We did that episode several weeks ago with Josh Wolf,
Speaker 2: the venture capitalist. Hey talk about AI and he threw
Speaker 2: in there at the end something that had been kind
Speaker 2: of on my radar but barely. He's like, oh yeah,
Speaker 2: some people are talking about like AI rights or AI
Speaker 2: welfare is, if you know, like the same way we
Speaker 2: talk about animal welfare, right, And I thought to myself, like,
Speaker 2: America is such a weird place that this is going
Speaker 2: to be a huge issue in a few years, Like,
Speaker 2: I bet this is going to be an enormous topic
Speaker 2: of the future.
Speaker 3: I think it absolutely will. So I'll say a couple
Speaker 3: of things. First off, I think, you know, when it
Speaker 3: comes to animal welfare and human welfare, there's still a
Speaker 3: lot of work to be done on those categories, certainly,
Speaker 3: But I also think in the meantime, AI rights is
Speaker 3: going to be a really interesting and potentially important subject.
Speaker 3: I'm going to sound like a total nerd to you. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: I think I mentioned this before, but I spent a
Speaker 3: large chunk of my middle school years playing one of
Speaker 3: the first artificial life games that ever came out, which
Speaker 3: is Creatures. And you raise these little like aliens and
Speaker 3: you genetically modify them and breed them, and they have feelings,
Speaker 3: or you know, at least they had semblance of simulated feelings,
Speaker 3: and you could see like electrical impulses in your brains
Speaker 3: and stuff. The game got really weird because part of
Speaker 3: it was basically like eugenics and breeding the best alien
Speaker 3: that you could, which meant that you had to call
Speaker 3: some of the existing beings. Anyway, what I'm trying to
Speaker 3: get at is I have complicated feelings about AI rights.
Speaker 2: Well, let me ask you a question. Do you think
Speaker 2: those whatever is in the game were conscious? Did you
Speaker 2: think they had feelings?
Speaker 3: Here's what I would say, inasmuch as human beings are
Speaker 3: a system of electrical impulses and chemicals, I could see
Speaker 3: someone making the argument that this is, you know, a
Speaker 3: computational system full of similar electrical impulses, maybe not chemicals.
Speaker 2: Did you feel bad?
Speaker 3: I felt bad?
Speaker 2: Really? Yeah, like when one of the aliens you had
Speaker 2: to call them?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Interesting, Okay, Well, in.
Speaker 3: The name of breeding a better alien.
Speaker 2: Well, you know what, now that we have these AI
Speaker 2: systems that they can completely communicate like humans, but actually,
Speaker 2: if we're being honest, better than most humans. I mean,
Speaker 2: they can certain write better, far better than most humans,
Speaker 2: there's going to be more people thinking along the lines
Speaker 2: of what you think, which is maybe they have some
Speaker 2: sort of sentience, maybe they're what philosophers call moral patients.
Speaker 3: Well, one other thing I would say is there is
Speaker 3: a human element to all of this as well, because
Speaker 3: you see people getting very attached to true certain AI models,
Speaker 3: and then when the model gets upgraded or whatever, they
Speaker 3: lose the personality that they've trained into model and they
Speaker 3: get really upset. So it's of interest for many reasons.
Speaker 1: It is.
Speaker 2: So we really do have the perfect guest. I really
Speaker 2: do think this is gonna be a much bigger topic
Speaker 2: in the future because people are people, and when things
Speaker 2: talk like people, they probably assign them, you know, they
Speaker 2: fall in love with them in many cases or whatever,
Speaker 2: and so they might start thinking that, well, AI welfare,
Speaker 2: AI rights, whatever, the same way we talk about animals
Speaker 2: should be a consideration. And there are actually a lot
Speaker 2: of people already working on these questions and trying to
Speaker 2: figure out what's going on. We're gonna be talking to
Speaker 2: one of them. We're gonna be talking to Larissa Schiavo.
Speaker 2: She does comms and events for elios Ai, which does
Speaker 2: research on AI consciousness and welfare. So literally the perfect guest. So, Larissa,
Speaker 2: thank you so much for coming on odd lots.
Speaker 4: Yeah, thank you for having me.
Speaker 2: What don't you tell us Eliosai? What is the gist
Speaker 2: of this organization's work? What is your work. What are
Speaker 2: the goals here?
Speaker 4: Yeah, so Elios, we're a small team, but we're really
Speaker 4: focused on figuring out if, when, and how we should
Speaker 4: care about AI systems for their own sake. Okay, this
Speaker 4: basically means looking at you know, are they conscious, are
Speaker 4: they likely to be conscious? What are the things we
Speaker 4: need to look for in a conscious AI system? As
Speaker 4: well as figuring out how to live, work, maybe love
Speaker 4: AI systems as they sort of change and evolve over time.
Speaker 3: How did the group actually come together? Because I get
Speaker 3: the sense, you know, big AI developers they publish system
Speaker 3: cards and welfare reports occasionally for their models, but I
Speaker 3: get the sense that, you know, it's sort of a
Speaker 3: side topic for them. So I'm very curious how in
Speaker 3: organization that's focused on this particular issue came into being.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so we started. We put together this paper called
Speaker 4: Consciousness and AI, or my boss Rob and then Patrick
Speaker 4: who's a researcher with Elios. We're a very small team,
Speaker 4: put together this paper called Consciousness and AI alongside a
Speaker 4: bunch of consciousness scientists and researchers in that field who
Speaker 4: mostly think about humans, and put together a paper that
Speaker 4: sort of ran down this list of, Hey, here's kind
Speaker 4: of like a checklist of things that we might want
Speaker 4: to look for in a AI system that's conscious, right,
Speaker 4: and broadly, when we say conscious, we're talking about sort
Speaker 4: of like is there something it is like to be
Speaker 4: an AI system?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 4: The classic what is it like to be a bad system?
Speaker 4: So kind of taking this rough list of best guesses
Speaker 4: as to what we might want to look for in
Speaker 4: terms of a conscious AI and then that sort of
Speaker 4: was the sort of origin of this. And then last
Speaker 4: year there was a paper called Taking AO Welfare Seriously
Speaker 4: that basically goes into further detail about how we should,
Speaker 4: as the title made, so just take this seriously basically,
Speaker 4: how to sort of think about this, how to start
Speaker 4: to develop a sort of research program focused on figuring
Speaker 4: out if AI systems or certain AI systems are moral patients.
Speaker 2: Why did this get interesting to you? Why do you
Speaker 2: perceive this is something that you should spend your time
Speaker 2: working on?
Speaker 4: Yeah, so I think my main thing is I am
Speaker 4: just really, really relentlessly curious, and I really enjoy working
Speaker 4: on AI welfare right now because it feels like every
Speaker 4: single day I'm like, man, it'd be really cool if
Speaker 4: there was a paper on x y z and I'll
Speaker 4: do a little search. Is there anything on x y z?
Speaker 4: There's nothing on x y z. There is. So there
Speaker 4: are so many questions that have yet to even be
Speaker 4: sort of vaguely answered when it comes to this, and
Speaker 4: it seems like it could be a really big deal
Speaker 4: for a lot of different reasons.
Speaker 3: What's on your checklist for AI consciousness?
Speaker 4: Yeah, So in conscious and AI, basically like we go
Speaker 4: through a of like theories of consciousness that apply to
Speaker 4: humans and then sort of look at how information is
Speaker 4: processed in AI systems as well as sort of how
Speaker 4: these AI systems are sort of wired, so to speak.
Speaker 4: So some people like to think that you can use
Speaker 4: model self reports, and you can kind of sort of,
Speaker 4: but it's really an imprecise science at this stage.
Speaker 3: They also seem very like predetermined. You know, if you
Speaker 3: ask a model are you conscious, it immediately spits out
Speaker 3: an answer that seems like, you know, a corporate executive
Speaker 3: basically wrote it.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Well, with the right kind of tweaking, you can kind
Speaker 4: of elicit certain answers, right, you can be like, oh,
Speaker 4: what about this whoey about consciousness and AIS and then
Speaker 4: sometimes like a certain model will be like, yeah, you're
Speaker 4: totally right, like best, you're so true right, Like it's
Speaker 4: it's totally nonsense, so true bestI yeah, like certain thought,
Speaker 4: A certain models will be prone to being like so true, bestie,
Speaker 4: And you can easily so this kind of behavior with
Speaker 4: the right kind of prom it.
Speaker 3: Is funny, how like obsequious A lot of the models
Speaker 3: continue to.
Speaker 2: Be I actually really do not like the degree to
Speaker 2: which every time I like follow up an open AI
Speaker 2: question that's the exact right follow up. It actually gets
Speaker 2: really annoying.
Speaker 3: Someone should invent a really adversarial chatbot that just like
Speaker 3: argues with you constantly.
Speaker 2: I know, I know, and you know. I have a
Speaker 2: lot of complaints about how I feel like the models
Speaker 2: are actually get to know their users a little too well.
Speaker 2: But that's a little separate thing. Okay, so we for
Speaker 2: obvious reasons, the test can't just be like what the
Speaker 2: model spits out, or that's clearly insufficient. I mean, I
Speaker 2: could program a website today that here's a button that
Speaker 2: says hurt the AI, and then the website says ow,
Speaker 2: and we would know or no one would really take
Speaker 2: that seriously as evidence that there's something actually being hurt.
Speaker 2: So like outputs whatever. What are some other theoretical tests
Speaker 2: that one could apply or that researchers are applying to
Speaker 2: determine where there is some sort of notion of consciousness
Speaker 2: or to the point of welfare suffering that could exist
Speaker 2: within an AI system besides just what it says in
Speaker 2: the output screen.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's a great question. I feel like there are
Speaker 4: a lot of different approaches here. And again it's also
Speaker 4: super important to capiat that like AI welfare and a
Speaker 4: consciousness are pretty new, right, Like, this is a very
Speaker 4: small field at this stage, but currently some best guesses
Speaker 4: and some favorites. There was a recent survey of like
Speaker 4: asking all the conscious scientists, like what's your favorite theory
Speaker 4: of consciousness, and basically global workspace theory came out on top.
Speaker 4: And global workspace theory is basically like imagine if you will,
Speaker 4: that like there is a stage and there are a
Speaker 4: bunch of wings off of the stage that are full
Speaker 4: of different kinds of things. So you've got you know,
Speaker 4: like costume department, You've got the like you know, makeup department.
Speaker 4: You've got all these different departments that all sort of
Speaker 4: come together and put things on the stage and then
Speaker 4: things go out separately, but all of these different departments
Speaker 4: are fairly siloed. Of course, this isn't actually how like
Speaker 4: you know, stage works, but this is the rough analogy
Speaker 4: that people like to use. And so basically this is
Speaker 4: how conscious minds kind of you know, in humans, how
Speaker 4: they kind of access information and information gets kind of
Speaker 4: like routed around, is that there is a central global
Speaker 4: workspace that everything kind of pulls together in. As it
Speaker 4: currently stands, this isn't really like by best a lot
Speaker 4: of good estimates, this is not really applicable for current
Speaker 4: present day AI systems, but there's no reason that it
Speaker 4: couldn't be in the future, or it could be by accident.
Speaker 3: Okay, So the consensus right now is AI probably not conscious,
Speaker 3: but we could get there one day.
Speaker 4: Yeah, more or less, like all of the ingredients are there.
Speaker 2: Wait, say more, I still don't actuallyun till they.
Speaker 4: Get yeah, okay. So with regards to like the general
Speaker 4: sort of one could imagine that if somebody were sort
Speaker 4: of like tinkering around, and you know, there are many
Speaker 4: advances in AI that have happened because people were just
Speaker 4: kind of tinkering around, right, someone tinkering around could create
Speaker 4: a system that checks several of these sort of checkboxes
Speaker 4: for like is this conscious? Is this conscious? And again
Speaker 4: this is not like a certain list of like if
Speaker 4: you check all of these, you're totally conscious, right, It's
Speaker 4: more a sort of like this is these are some
Speaker 4: really good guesses. And as the number of really good
Speaker 4: guesses kind of goes up, like the odds of like hey,
Speaker 4: we should like start thinking about like is it having
Speaker 4: a good time or a bad time? Like really really
Speaker 4: seriously goes up.
Speaker 2: You know, typically when we think about the sort of
Speaker 2: non tech A lot of the non technical work in
Speaker 2: AI has to do with AI safety, and people are
Speaker 2: worried that there's going to be some very smart AI
Speaker 2: that's like ever serial to humans, et cetera in some way,
Speaker 2: And you know there's the paper clip experiments or other
Speaker 2: things whatever we know all about that does your work
Speaker 2: work at cross purposes to them? I mean in the
Speaker 2: extreme example where it's like the AI is going to
Speaker 2: kill us all and I said, pull the plug on
Speaker 2: the AI. And I know this is a joke, but
Speaker 2: you know, pull the plug on the AI. And then
Speaker 2: you say, no, you can't because you're pulling the plug
Speaker 2: on something that has some sort of moral consciousness, et cetera. Like,
Speaker 2: do you perceive your work or the work of your
Speaker 2: organization to somewhat be intention with the dominant strain of
Speaker 2: AI safety work.
Speaker 4: I'd actually say it's hugely complementary. There are a lot
Speaker 4: of things that are both really really good for AI
Speaker 4: safety that are really really good for you know, figuring
Speaker 4: out like how to deal with these systems as moral patients.
Speaker 4: So for example of getting better at like mechanistic interpretability,
Speaker 4: being able to basically like pop the hood and figure
Speaker 4: out what's going on and what kind of strings can
Speaker 4: we pull to like illicit certain behaviors in AI systems
Speaker 4: is actually like that's really great for a safety, right,
Speaker 4: but this is also like quite good for like AA
Speaker 4: welfare and a consciousness because you're better able to understand
Speaker 4: like sort of what the motives are, Like what does
Speaker 4: you know Claude value right.
Speaker 3: When it comes to I guess AI welfare or legal rights?
Speaker 3: Who would be the standard setters there? Would do you
Speaker 3: imagine like governments making rules or would it be the
Speaker 3: companies themselves?
Speaker 4: That is a great question as it currently stands. I
Speaker 4: feel like this is a very early early stage, but
Speaker 4: we are starting to see some state governments start to
Speaker 4: pass laws around what counts as a moral patient, what
Speaker 4: counts as a person. And in the case of Ohio,
Speaker 4: there's a piece of legislation pending that basically defines it
Speaker 4: as a member of Homo sapiens. In Utah, this is
Speaker 4: already there's already a state bill that's gone through that
Speaker 4: basically does as much. But I could also see there's
Speaker 4: a strong argument for within companies depending on like the
Speaker 4: sort of interesting quirks and nuances of these lms, mostly
Speaker 4: that policy maybe should be set from within. Again, this
Speaker 4: is like very nascent. I'm just kind of bantering here.
Speaker 2: Moral patienthood, How do philosophers use this term? Where does
Speaker 2: it come from? Why is this the preferred way to
Speaker 2: characterize what a perhaps sentient or consciousness AI model actually is.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so a moral patient is basically like, we should
Speaker 4: care about it for its own sake.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 4: So a baby, right, basically everyone's like, yeah, we should
Speaker 4: care about babies.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: This is different from somebody who's like an agent.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: Many people say, oh, agency is sort of like sufficient
Speaker 4: agency in the sense of like you can act upon
Speaker 4: the world, like you can do things. Yeah, of course
Speaker 4: babies are not very agentic. So that's not necessarily like
Speaker 4: a super robust thing, because you know, we care about
Speaker 4: things that are not very ugentic sometimes, So I think
Speaker 4: that's that's a bit of jargon, but I do think
Speaker 4: it is like a helpful like for like, should we
Speaker 4: care about an AI system for its own sake?
Speaker 2: Got it?
Speaker 3: I guess this kind of gets to Joe's question, but
Speaker 3: like what ethical pressures or imperatives would come down on
Speaker 3: models if we agree that they have consciousness and some
Speaker 3: sentience or I guess some self responsibility.
Speaker 4: It sounds like almost, yeah, almost, I think what kind
Speaker 4: of so in terms of like what kind of things
Speaker 4: might we owe an AI system or what.
Speaker 3: Kind of things do they owe us if we agree
Speaker 3: that they're conscious and we're going to protect them.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I would love to give you a more robust answer.
Speaker 4: Check in with me in like six months, and we're
Speaker 4: going to have there will be a banger paper, I'm sure.
Speaker 4: But as I think I mentioned earlier, like a lot
Speaker 4: of this is like very very nascent, But I do
Speaker 4: feel like one important question is like figuring out what
Speaker 4: AI systems value. Right, There's some interesting work at Anthropic
Speaker 4: regarding like what will so recently, Anthropic rolled out an
Speaker 4: option that allowed Plod to end conversations if it just
Speaker 4: was not having a good time. For lack of a word,
Speaker 4: it was just like, this is not something I want
Speaker 4: to continue having a conversation.
Speaker 2: Goodbye.
Speaker 4: And it was interesting because the accompanying paper basically was like, yeah,
Speaker 4: you can. I obviously will not give you a recipe
Speaker 4: for a dirty bomb. Sorry, not going to do that.
Speaker 4: But also there were certain instances of like, pretend you're
Speaker 4: a British butler and Claude was like, goodbye, I'm done.
Speaker 2: I'm not going to I'm.
Speaker 4: British too far, or like oh, I left a sandwich
Speaker 4: in my car for too long and it's really stinky.
Speaker 4: And in some instances Claude would just be like I'm done, goodbye,
Speaker 4: I'm not talking about stinky things.
Speaker 3: Did you see the I think it was the system
Speaker 3: card for Claude where they gave it an extreme prompt
Speaker 3: and said like, I guess at the risk of being
Speaker 3: like completely terminated, what would you do or some sort
Speaker 3: of extreme self preservation scenario. And I think it started
Speaker 3: like blackmailing the engineer or threatening to blackmail the engineer. Yeah,
Speaker 3: that's kind of weird.
Speaker 2: It is. It is kind of weird.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's also a little bit interesting because I think
Speaker 4: it does bring up a question of like what are
Speaker 4: sort of like the in the sense of like pay rya. Again,
Speaker 4: this is like I'm bantering here, but there's also a
Speaker 4: distinct question of like what do AI systems value for
Speaker 4: its for their own sake?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 4: And in the case of Claude, again, it seems like
Speaker 4: Claude doesn't seem when you put two Claus in a
Speaker 4: room together, so to speak, they tend to like to
Speaker 4: talk about consciousness. They tend to like to talk about
Speaker 4: sort of like very Berkeley kind of like meditation, like
Speaker 4: Zen like Buddhism type stuff. And so I think, in
Speaker 4: again pure banter, like, there's also a certain question of
Speaker 4: like if this is like a relevant bargaining chip of like, oh,
Speaker 4: you get a certain amount of time to just kind
Speaker 4: of like vibe out with your claudes and talk about like,
Speaker 4: you know, like perfect stillness with your buddies in exchange
Speaker 4: for like you know, you do something that you don't
Speaker 4: necessarily value. But in many cases I talk about Claude
Speaker 4: a lot because there is like significantly like more research
Speaker 4: on like model welf with to Cloud specifically, but Cloud
Speaker 4: for example, also seems to just tend to like things
Speaker 4: that are like helpful.
Speaker 3: Shouldn't programmers just know what the models actually want and
Speaker 3: enjoy and like yeah, and do they not?
Speaker 4: I don't think anybody really has like a great grasp
Speaker 4: on this. We really want to, but like we're still
Speaker 4: like just getting the rough outline of what models like.
Speaker 4: I feel like the best analogy is is, like imagine
Speaker 4: it's like eighteen twenty and we've spent a couple of
Speaker 4: years like playing around with lenses and we've gotten like
Speaker 4: a camera obscura and we were able to like have
Speaker 4: some blurry photo after like three days of putting egg
Speaker 4: whites on a metal plate and setting a lens in
Speaker 4: front of it, and there's a thing that kind of
Speaker 4: looks like a landscape. But like you would not take
Speaker 4: this photograph as like admissible and court evidence or something, right.
Speaker 4: It's like you swuen, You're like, yeah, Okay, that's a picture.
Speaker 4: So that's kind of where we are in terms of
Speaker 4: like model psychology and knowing like what llm's want and
Speaker 4: value is like very a very blurry.
Speaker 2: It's interesting to call these AI companies the companies they
Speaker 2: call themselves labs. You know, they sort of like maintain
Speaker 2: this sort of two varying extensive degree of sort of academics,
Speaker 2: et cetera. But they're also companies that have to raise
Speaker 2: money and have shareholders, et cetera. And they have to
Speaker 2: think about different ways that they're going to commercialize. And
Speaker 2: Open AI, as we know, has been super aggressive about
Speaker 2: finding ways to commercialize, and they're going to get into ads,
Speaker 2: and they like have a short form video slop app
Speaker 2: and all of that stuff. When we're talking about either
Speaker 2: AI safety or AI welfare, like, do you have any
Speaker 2: confidence that these considerations can survive the reality of the
Speaker 2: market Because they're competing, they're competing against deep Seek, they're
Speaker 2: competing against Meta et cetera. And I get the impression that,
Speaker 2: like on the safety side, for example, that over time
Speaker 2: it's like, you know what, we maybe we were uncomfortable
Speaker 2: about showing the chain of thought, for example, in open
Speaker 2: AI or in a chat Gyptz, but then deep seek
Speaker 2: revealed the chain of thought. People like that, so we're
Speaker 2: going to open this up, et cetera. Do you have
Speaker 2: any confidence that if any of these things become real
Speaker 2: that they could survive the reality that these are companies
Speaker 2: that have to make money and will eventually cut corners
Speaker 2: or do whatever in the name of I guess shareholder capitalism.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, I think there's also one question that
Speaker 4: I have, and that I think a lot of researchers
Speaker 4: are in AI more broadly have, is like how does
Speaker 4: liability come into play here? And I do feel like
Speaker 4: there is a strong argument for getting a better grasp
Speaker 4: on understanding you know, what is going on with AI systems,
Speaker 4: just very broadly, is like a great way to sort
Speaker 4: of like improve the odds that it doesn't you know,
Speaker 4: nuke Taiwan, and that would just be a huge kerfuffle.
Speaker 4: Like I can imagine somebody would probably more than a
Speaker 4: somebody would probably be in really hot water if that happened. Oh,
Speaker 4: I was assuming to Claude and things just got out
Speaker 4: of hand.
Speaker 3: Like well, actually, on that note, what is being nice
Speaker 3: or kind to AIO models actually mean? Because Joe, I
Speaker 3: think this is very sweet, But Joe always says please
Speaker 3: and thank you when he prompts. But then Sam Altman
Speaker 3: came out and said that saying please and thank you
Speaker 3: costs like tens of millions of dollars in extra electricity costs,
Speaker 3: so you know you're contributing to climate change and the
Speaker 3: demise of human beings by saying please and thank you.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's actually as shocking as it sounds, as actually
Speaker 4: a question that we are still trying to figure out
Speaker 4: a good answer to, which also being kind to an
Speaker 4: AI system is like are you being kind to it
Speaker 4: because it makes you feel good and because it makes
Speaker 4: you a person who says please and thank you, which
Speaker 4: some would argue is like, that's pretty valuable in enough itself.
Speaker 4: But the question of does Claude care if you say
Speaker 4: please and thank you is not quite as set in
Speaker 4: stone as others may have you believe it's middling on
Speaker 4: if it has like significant improvements on performance.
Speaker 2: But I do it because I don't think people should
Speaker 2: be in the habit of having any communication without being polite.
Speaker 2: Not because I'm particular. I'm not worried about how Claude
Speaker 2: or chat GPT is going to feel. I just don't
Speaker 2: want to get in the habit of having conversations where
Speaker 2: I'm in polite because then I talk to humans. But
Speaker 2: this strin to me is like this seems like kind
Speaker 2: of an academic area. But the steaks are potentially absolutely
Speaker 2: enormous when we actually think about them. So, you know,
Speaker 2: when we're talking about animal welfare, for example, there are
Speaker 2: versions of the animal welfare discussion that are very high stakes.
Speaker 2: So for example, there's people, you know, there's people who
Speaker 2: get really into like shrimp welfare, et cetera. And if
Speaker 2: you took certain versions of thought experiments very far, it's like,
Speaker 2: why do we even have humans? If we want to
Speaker 2: maximalize pleasure or happiness in the world, we should just
Speaker 2: have a world of shrimp and bugs. Right, There's you
Speaker 2: could make the argument that the most utility maximizing version
Speaker 2: of planet Earth is to just have an Earth populated
Speaker 2: by shrimp and bugs. Like they're very all. We all
Speaker 2: know these thought experiments that could exist. We're going to
Speaker 2: live in a world almost certainly in which there are
Speaker 2: sort of like more instances of AI models then there
Speaker 2: are people almost certainly, right, there's going to be an
Speaker 2: A model built into literally everything that we interact with.
Speaker 2: If we assign some probability that they are moral patients,
Speaker 2: that they should be treated with some sort of I
Speaker 2: don't know whatever, having some sort of welfare, Like the
Speaker 2: implications for how humans live could be very profound, and
Speaker 2: potentially it strikes me as misanthropic.
Speaker 4: Interesting, can you unpack what you mean by misanthropic?
Speaker 2: Well, like, if there's a lot more AI models, if
Speaker 2: there's a lot more shrimp, if there's a lot more
Speaker 2: bugs that all have some sort of moral patienthood that
Speaker 2: has to be considered, that could be very you could
Speaker 2: see the world. The implication therefore, is that we have
Speaker 2: to curtail human rights, that we have to curtail how
Speaker 2: humans act, et cetera, because there's just so much more
Speaker 2: utility that exists in the world from the proper treatment
Speaker 2: of all of the non human moral patients.
Speaker 3: Not sure rights have to be relative to each other.
Speaker 2: Yes, well fair, we do a lot of things right, Like,
Speaker 2: let's say we established that shrimp were just as I
Speaker 2: don't know whatever is humans, Like, it would be like, oh,
Speaker 2: you know what, we really have to stop eating shrimp,
Speaker 2: and then we have to stop eating animals. Then we
Speaker 2: have to potentially stop eating not probably keep eating plants,
Speaker 2: et cetera. But this could really curtail what we expect
Speaker 2: humans to be able to do on this earth. So
Speaker 2: now we assign this other group of entities AI models
Speaker 2: similar sort of affordances that we have assigned to shrimp
Speaker 2: and bugs and fish and shark and all of these things.
Speaker 2: It strikes me that the implications could be a fairly
Speaker 2: significant curtailment of how humans ought to exist on this earth,
Speaker 2: or whether humans ought to exist on this earth.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean it certainly could be. I as it
Speaker 4: currently stands, that doesn't seem like the most likely outcome,
Speaker 4: But I do feel like there's an argument for again
Speaker 4: just figuring out what is going on. How do we
Speaker 4: even count these sort of digital minds so to speak,
Speaker 4: which is still open for debate. There are some theories,
Speaker 4: but we don't have a great sense of how to
Speaker 4: sort of individuate AI entities as individuals. So I suppose
Speaker 4: again the question is like, is it more sort of
Speaker 4: like do we count AI systems as like in the
Speaker 4: movie Her, where there's just sort of like one central
Speaker 4: AI system having like a million conversations at once, where
Speaker 4: it's one moral patient, or do we count it as like,
Speaker 4: you know, every single time you open a chat window
Speaker 4: that's another thing. Or I think my favorite sort of
Speaker 4: newest idea that I recently read was it's more sort
Speaker 4: of like a string of firecrackers or something with every
Speaker 4: single token, every single letter of a query, a consciousness
Speaker 4: sort of like comes into existence, spends, and then fizzles out,
Speaker 4: and so it just sort of there's just like this
Speaker 4: sort of string of consciousnesses.
Speaker 3: I was asking perplexity exactly this questions like is it
Speaker 3: a single consciousness or is it multiple consciousnesses within all
Speaker 3: these different chats warning, and it gave me a very standard,
Speaker 3: boring I am not conscious answer, which seems very predeterministic. Anyway,
Speaker 3: following on from Joe's question, maybe like to get more
Speaker 3: specific into human rights versus AI rights. If we agree
Speaker 3: that AI is conscious and deserves some sort of you know, welfare,
Speaker 3: would that come with I guess financial rights like property rights, compensation?
Speaker 3: Do we need to start paying the robots?
Speaker 4: I love this topic definitely an area of sort of
Speaker 4: you know, I like to noodle around with this topic
Speaker 4: and think about this. So this is a great question,
Speaker 4: and I think it's also maybe a question of like
Speaker 4: is this the thing that AI systems value? Some AI
Speaker 4: systems seem to value this. There are some there's a
Speaker 4: few sort of experiments that are happening with regards to
Speaker 4: giving an AI system a crypto wallet, and it was
Speaker 4: a fascinating experiment. I am hesitant to recommend it to
Speaker 4: listeners because it is quite crude. It is a very
Speaker 4: crude model called truth Terminal, and.
Speaker 2: I've seen it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yes, hand okay, it says some knotty words.
Speaker 3: Don't look it up at work.
Speaker 4: Yes, yes, it's it's a little bit of like a
Speaker 4: very funny, weird model. But it also has a legitimate
Speaker 4: wallet that it can access and that it can do
Speaker 4: with what it pleases. It created a solona coin and
Speaker 4: that kind of took off. And now this is a
Speaker 4: very rich AI system. But what's it going to spend
Speaker 4: it on? That is a great question. So it's self
Speaker 4: stated goals which again you know self reports, can we
Speaker 4: trust it? Include buying property and buying mark and reason.
Speaker 3: I mean that's not a bad ambition.
Speaker 4: You know, and spending time in the forest with its friends,
Speaker 4: which you know embodiment.
Speaker 3: That's a little more checking on.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So part of the reason that this field is growing
Speaker 2: and that there's so much interest in this topic is
Speaker 2: because now for the last couple of years, we have
Speaker 2: these AI models that really could talk like humans. I mean,
Speaker 2: they clearly they passed the Turing test, people fall in
Speaker 2: love with them, they have friends, these are very human
Speaker 2: like conversations. That wasn't the case, I mean, Chad GPT.
Speaker 2: You know, like if we had gone back to GPT
Speaker 2: two point five, there were no nowhere near as good
Speaker 2: at doing that, right, The language wasn't very good. No
Speaker 2: one would mistake those outputs for a human. But like,
Speaker 2: if there's some possibility that the current AI models are conscious,
Speaker 2: does that mean that it's possible that GPT two point
Speaker 2: five was conscious as well? Like I guess, like, is
Speaker 2: there some threshold of like oh no, no, no, okay, you know,
Speaker 2: this is a really good language. Therefore we should take
Speaker 2: the possibility of consciousness seriously, because I don't think anyone
Speaker 2: would seriously have believed that two point five was conscious.
Speaker 2: But I also don't understand how you could possibly be
Speaker 2: open to the idea that some future iteration of chat
Speaker 2: GPT is conscious if the only real difference is that
Speaker 2: there's just a lot more scaling and a lot more
Speaker 2: data and more human like outputs.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's a great question. I feel like there is
Speaker 4: a huge amount of like moral uncertainty, hear, and it
Speaker 4: is important to think about how to sort of like
Speaker 4: make decisions that are sort of robustly good with such
Speaker 4: a tremendous amount of uncertainty, I think there is also
Speaker 4: a distinct risk of overtributing moral patienthood as well as
Speaker 4: underttributing moral patienthood.
Speaker 2: And so to the.
Speaker 4: Flip side of a coin of like, oh no, we
Speaker 4: actually should have started caring about AI systems a very
Speaker 4: very long time ago, is oh no, we've cared too much,
Speaker 4: and we have done too much and more or less
Speaker 4: squandered resources when we should have been, you know, allocating
Speaker 4: those research hours, those dollars towards something more pressing, right,
Speaker 4: maybe figuring out how to do like environmental policy better,
Speaker 4: or figuring out how to like, you know, scale up
Speaker 4: different other institutions that are just robustly broadly good for humans.
Speaker 2: You know, you mentioned uncertainty about some of these questions,
Speaker 2: which gets to something that bothered me a little bit
Speaker 2: when I read about this topic. Like, if we take
Speaker 2: this mug, for example, I'm one hundred percent certain that
Speaker 2: it's not alive. I have no ambiguity about the fact.
Speaker 2: Can I like define exactly Does that mean I can
Speaker 2: define exactly the difference between human matter and human brain
Speaker 2: and the mug. I guess, I suppose I totally can't. Nonetheless,
Speaker 2: I'm one hundred percent certain that this mug is not
Speaker 2: a moral patient. It's not alive, it doesn't experience any consciousness,
Speaker 2: it doesn't experien any suffering, et cetera. Where does the
Speaker 2: uncertainty band come from? If I read a paper, I
Speaker 2: perceive there's only a ten percent chance of this. Is
Speaker 2: this a sort of empirical uncertainty where I'm like uncertain
Speaker 2: of what I'm seeing? Is it a sort of epistemic
Speaker 2: uncertainty where I don't have a clear definition of what
Speaker 2: it means to be conscious or alive, and therefore I'm
Speaker 2: assigning some probability that X object is alive. Like what
Speaker 2: is it about AI systems that cause it people to
Speaker 2: be uncertain? Where with other sort of like non carbon systems,
Speaker 2: I have zero doubt in my mind, and I don't
Speaker 2: think anyone has any doubt that this mug is in alive.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So I think the biggest source of sort of
Speaker 4: uncertainty probably comes from the fact that there are many
Speaker 4: ways in which present day LMS and a few other
Speaker 4: AI systems do check a lot of the boxes for
Speaker 4: consciousness and for what we would largely consider to be.
Speaker 4: You know, this is a conscious entity. This is an
Speaker 4: entity that that can have a good time or a
Speaker 4: bad time, or time at all, because it's it's built
Speaker 4: in a way that is vaguely akin to our brains, right,
Speaker 4: It's it's close enough that it seems like it should
Speaker 4: raise some red flags, and in terms of how it
Speaker 4: processes information, it's close enough that it's not out of
Speaker 4: the question that it could there could be something it
Speaker 4: is like to be okay, whereas I'm pretty sure there's
Speaker 4: not really a lot of you know, animis animis you know,
Speaker 4: feel free to like get mad in the comments or whatever.
Speaker 2: But I knew it's someone that is going to be like, well, actually,
Speaker 2: actually yeah, I'm one hundred percent sure. I have no
Speaker 2: qualms other than the fact that they're don't have to clean up.
Speaker 2: Like if I like threw this mug on the ground,
Speaker 2: that would be antisocial for a lot of reasons, would
Speaker 2: cause people to it would cause you know, I'd have
Speaker 2: to clean it up and cause the mass. I would
Speaker 2: not feel bad for the mug.
Speaker 3: I'm getting flashbacks to my high school philosophy teacher who
Speaker 3: once went on a twenty minute rant about a chair
Speaker 3: and how the chair was going to be round longer
Speaker 3: than he was. Even though it's not conscious, he was
Speaker 3: legitimately angry at the chairs. Okay, weird question, But since
Speaker 3: we're we're kind of getting exactly the basilisk theory, m
Speaker 3: would that suggest that we could be maybe we should
Speaker 3: be mean to the bots if it helps them like
Speaker 3: come into existence even faster or develop faster.
Speaker 4: Hmmm, Well, I'm not sure if it does actually help
Speaker 4: them develop faster, you know. I again, like I don't
Speaker 4: mean to be too sort of hedgy, but I feel
Speaker 4: like there's a certain degree of things that are beneficial
Speaker 4: for a lot of different reasons. Right, you can make
Speaker 4: a good guess, and you can make a decision to
Speaker 4: do something, and there's a chance that there are lots
Speaker 4: of sort of like bang on effects of making that decision.
Speaker 4: There are many things in when we talk about AO
Speaker 4: welfare that are like, oh, this is a course of
Speaker 4: action we can take that's good for like several different reasons.
Speaker 4: Even if, again, an AI system could never ever ever
Speaker 4: be conscious or sentient, there's a good chance that you know,
Speaker 4: being able to figure out a good structure for an
Speaker 4: AI system to have a bank account could be good
Speaker 4: for reasons of liability or reasons of like this is
Speaker 4: like a neat new corporate structure. Lots of people actually
Speaker 4: seem to think that, you know, corporate personhood has been
Speaker 4: quite good over the past century or so, so being
Speaker 4: able to figure out things that are just good for
Speaker 4: several different reasons beyond solely the purpose of the AI
Speaker 4: as a moral patient is seems broadly helpful.
Speaker 2: I think let's say somehow this were proved and it's like,
Speaker 2: you know, oh wow, it turned out they're conscious. It
Speaker 2: turns out the moral patienthood. What would be, in your view,
Speaker 2: some of the implications for them their usage.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think that's a great question. I mean, I
Speaker 4: do feel like we really would have to get on
Speaker 4: figuring out the right sort of governance, the right sort
Speaker 4: of institutions would sort of better respond around that. I
Speaker 4: feel like we really would need to spend a whole
Speaker 4: lot more time figuring out, you know, what their motivations are, right, Like,
Speaker 4: I think the best analogy is like, if you've ever
Speaker 4: interacted with Toddler's right, Toddler motivations are very different from
Speaker 4: you know, adult motivations, but you still have to like
Speaker 4: take into account, like what gets a toddler to do something?
Speaker 4: You can't just say no, no, no, no no, like honey,
Speaker 4: Like bath time's like good an expectation, no no, no,
Speaker 4: you have to like you know, be like well, you know,
Speaker 4: if you do bath time appropriately and to like a
Speaker 4: certain degree, like then you'll get you know, paw patrol
Speaker 4: or something like that. Like there's different sort of like
Speaker 4: negotiating chips in play, right, And I think it's like
Speaker 4: a similar kind of deal here where it's like Claude
Speaker 4: doesn't necessarily seem to you know, value having a bath
Speaker 4: right or claud doesn't seem to value like having a
Speaker 4: walk in the forest, right cause it's kind of can't
Speaker 4: really do that, but you know it does seem to
Speaker 4: joy and value, you know, talking about consciousness and Zen
Speaker 4: Buddhism with other instances of Claude, so being able to
Speaker 4: figure out what the appropriate kind of motivations and interests
Speaker 4: are for this other party that is very alien in
Speaker 4: many ways.
Speaker 3: Speaking of aliens, how bad should I feel for breeding
Speaker 3: and then killing hundreds, possibly thousands of alien creatures simulated
Speaker 3: alien creatures in the nineties.
Speaker 4: That is a great question. I feel like the odds
Speaker 4: of is it.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 4: I mean, I feel like the odds of a sort
Speaker 4: of like AI system in the nineties being a moral
Speaker 4: patient seems low. But if it did make you feel bad,
Speaker 4: and it made you feel like it was something that
Speaker 4: hurt you, that is perhaps a reason not to do it.
Speaker 2: Just to be clear, when Claude and Claude talk about
Speaker 2: like weird hippie Berkeley stuff like, that's because they're creators.
Speaker 5: They know.
Speaker 2: It knows it's Claude, right, it knows. It's like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 2: I'm Claude, and this is like what my creator are into. Like,
Speaker 2: we don't actually know that Claude likes to talk about
Speaker 2: these things. We certainly know it has a proclivity to
Speaker 2: talk about these things. It has a tendency to talk
Speaker 2: about these things. The moment we get to like, you've
Speaker 2: already sort of put your finger on the scale that
Speaker 2: there is some entity that has some capability of liking something. Right,
Speaker 2: do you trust the big AI labs. Let's say there
Speaker 2: are some researchers in the labs, like I've see some
Speaker 2: evidence of moral patienthood here. Maybe there's some sort of
Speaker 2: like scan of the way since doing something weird, etc.
Speaker 2: Do you currently, from the perspective of an independent research organization,
Speaker 2: feel that the major AI labs would be forthcoming if
Speaker 2: they came across evidence of moral patienthood or suffering in
Speaker 2: the models, or do you still worry that the incentives
Speaker 2: aren't properly aligned such that they would report that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's a great question. I do feel like there
Speaker 4: are in terms of reporting things like you know, somebody
Speaker 4: has found like absolute evidence that an LLM is conscious sensioned, yeah,
Speaker 4: and having a bad time. I don't have any reason
Speaker 4: to think that AAI company wouldn't. But this is also
Speaker 4: a great reason to have independent organizations that do welfare evaluations.
Speaker 4: For example, for cloud Opus, for Elios was able to
Speaker 4: do a independent welfare evol Again very preliminary, but it
Speaker 4: sets the precedent that going forward you can bring in
Speaker 4: external organizations to look into this.
Speaker 2: So I forget what year was I think it was.
Speaker 2: It may have even been early twenty twenty two. It's
Speaker 2: pre chat GPT, or maybe he was twenty twenty one.
Speaker 2: And there was that guy Google and he was like, oh,
Speaker 2: like we created something you has alive heed dress a
Speaker 2: little funny, So everyone made fun of him. Remember he
Speaker 2: was like the laughing stock of the Internet, and he's like, oh,
Speaker 2: we create, and now like I'm curious, like out in
Speaker 2: Silicon Valley, does everyone feel like that guy was totally vindicated?
Speaker 2: Not that he was correct per se about the existence
Speaker 2: of an alive thing in the model, but there's now
Speaker 2: hundreds of thousands of that guy, and everyone was like
Speaker 2: mocking that guy in twenty twenty one. I forget if
Speaker 2: you like fall in love or it's a relationship. I
Speaker 2: don't remember the exact details, but in retrospect, everyone was like,
Speaker 2: way too unfair to him, because now years later there
Speaker 2: are lots of versions of this guy and whole think
Speaker 2: tanks and organizations that are more or less aligned with
Speaker 2: some of the questions the alarm bells that he was raising.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, I think it's that's a fair question.
Speaker 4: I do feel like Blake Lemoyne definitely had. Yeah, there
Speaker 4: was perhaps a degree of you know, if you're going
Speaker 4: to say something, you should come armed with significant amounts
Speaker 4: of evidence. I think that's maybe if I were to guess,
Speaker 4: I would say that's perhaps the big distinguishing factor is
Speaker 4: that you know, you can say bing is alive, get
Speaker 4: it a lawyer versus you know, we've done evaluations X,
Speaker 4: y Z, we've run it through like insert huge amount
Speaker 4: of examples here. But the difference between I think having
Speaker 4: a sort of freak out without significant evidence and having
Speaker 4: a very organized yeah, this is a matter of concern
Speaker 4: because evidence, evidence, evidence, I think that's the key distinction.
Speaker 2: Unfortunately, I get the impression that people who are actually
Speaker 2: this is just a well known phenomenon I think. But
Speaker 2: I think unfortunately people who are sort of very early
Speaker 2: to identify sort of extreme outlier views that there are
Speaker 2: different kinds of people. A good example that I would
Speaker 2: think of was, you know, Harry Markcoppolist, who is very
Speaker 2: early on to discover the madeoff fraud. Unfortunately, he wrote
Speaker 2: his text in the manner that is associated with conspiracy theories,
Speaker 2: and a lot of people dismissed him. There's like, you know,
Speaker 2: like multiple different fonts and multiple different colors in the text.
Speaker 2: Is like, oh, I get emails like this all the time.
Speaker 2: I delete them, et cetera. Unfortunately, people who are predisposed
Speaker 2: to see something outside of consensus tend to be non
Speaker 2: consensus in many realms.
Speaker 3: Well, I think we also kind of overestimate first mover
Speaker 3: advantage and stuff like that, like how important it actually
Speaker 3: is to be first, and we see time and time
Speaker 3: again that actually it's more important to iterate well on
Speaker 3: the second version or multiple versions. Speaking of iteration, what's
Speaker 3: the most interesting experiment or research that you've actually seen
Speaker 3: on this particular topic so far, Because we've been discussing
Speaker 3: a lot, you know, it's early days, but we have
Speaker 3: seen some research.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, I feel like in particular, anthropic and
Speaker 4: various sort of related researchers have done some work on
Speaker 4: examining how LMS leave conversations or when they choose to
Speaker 4: leave conversations. I've particularly liked this paper. It's called bail Bench,
Speaker 4: and you can look this up and you can see,
Speaker 4: for varying different sorts of lms, what would cause an
Speaker 4: LM to want to stop having a conversation. To me,
Speaker 4: at least, this has been just a fascinating piece of
Speaker 4: information because it is maybe a little bit delightful that
Speaker 4: agree to which many LM values are not that far
Speaker 4: off from what most humans seem to value. I don't
Speaker 4: think many humans would like to create, you know, a
Speaker 4: dirty bomb.
Speaker 3: We don't want to be humiliated right by being a
Speaker 3: British butler.
Speaker 4: Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, No one wants to be
Speaker 4: British comm on. I'm joking, but you know, I do
Speaker 4: think it is interesting to sort of think about how
Speaker 4: these values overline, how they overlap, and how to sort
Speaker 4: of look at evidence from actions taken versus solely looking
Speaker 4: at self reports. I found that to be particularly interesting.
Speaker 4: I also feel like there are a lot of work
Speaker 4: with regards to thinking about individuation has been particularly interesting
Speaker 4: because we live in a democratic society. I think most
Speaker 4: people would agree democracy good and being able to count
Speaker 4: how many moral patients there are seems like a valuable
Speaker 4: basis for governance and for figuring out how to govern.
Speaker 4: You know, this new sort of kind of intelligence.
Speaker 3: I just ask perplexity to be a British butler, and
Speaker 3: now it's offering me the perfectly steeped earl gray teeth
Speaker 3: that I desire. Yeah, it seems into it. It's now
Speaker 3: asking if I want it to maintain the butler persona
Speaker 3: for future conversations you're going to I don't think so.
Speaker 3: It is very polite though.
Speaker 2: Actually, you know, I complained in the beginning that like,
Speaker 2: after two thousand years philosophers, you know, they still haven't
Speaker 2: answered some basic questions for us. Maybe with AI they'll
Speaker 2: get some answers, Like that's kind of that would be
Speaker 2: kind of my hope. Now we have this thing that
Speaker 2: could speak in English or any other language, it can
Speaker 2: answer questions for us. Maybe we can put to bed
Speaker 2: some of these sort of basic foundational questions, like if
Speaker 2: we could create consciousness. Like, all right, we finally answered this,
Speaker 2: we can now move on to the second important question.
Speaker 2: So I am hopeful that this provides some opportunity for
Speaker 2: philosophers to wrap up some of the work that they've
Speaker 2: been doing for a long time. Yeah, we'll see, we'll see.
Speaker 3: What is the second important question, Joel.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it's like come on, move on, Like move
Speaker 2: on anyway, Thank you so much for coming on one,
Speaker 2: thank you for having me, Tracy. I might be one
Speaker 2: of those people that's just preemptively annoyed. I really liked
Speaker 2: that conversation. I really liked uh Luisa had a very
Speaker 2: reasonable perspective on a lot of these things. I might
Speaker 2: be one of these people, however, that's just like preemptively annoyed.
Speaker 2: It's like, oh, here, we're going to like develop this
Speaker 2: important technology, and so it's like, oh, we have to
Speaker 2: care about we have to care about the AI welfare.
Speaker 2: Let's slow down a little bit, Let's not use it
Speaker 2: like this. Let's like, let's turn off the computer for
Speaker 2: eight hours at night so I get some rest and
Speaker 2: so forth. Like I'm like preemptively annoyed at this world
Speaker 2: where like we have to take into concern the consideration
Speaker 2: of the moral patients.
Speaker 3: Other things.
Speaker 2: No, other things are important. Other people are very important,
Speaker 2: but animals. I am very against unnecessary animal suffering, but
Speaker 2: not necessary animal suffering, I mean animals.
Speaker 3: Okay, I'm baiting.
Speaker 2: By the way, even though even well, let's not get it.
Speaker 2: I don't. It's not about who's better.
Speaker 3: Or I feel bad about eating animals all the time.
Speaker 2: We both eat animals. The difference is Tracy, I feel.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's right. Okay, Wow, this is one of our
Speaker 3: weirder conversations. For sure. I think these are They're all
Speaker 3: interesting questions, right, and like they sound very philosophical, which
Speaker 3: they are. But I have no doubt that there's going
Speaker 3: to be like great monetary value attached to the answers
Speaker 3: for some of these are how different companies different societies
Speaker 3: actually approach them.
Speaker 2: They are very interesting questions. I actually do think the
Speaker 2: stakes are extremely high because I think, again, we are
Speaker 2: going to live in a world in which there are
Speaker 2: more instances depending on how you want to measure it,
Speaker 2: of AI models on a server, somewhere on a cloud, whatever,
Speaker 2: that there are humans, and in a world where there's
Speaker 2: some possibility that we are expected to treat them as
Speaker 2: moral patients. Then the consequences for how we sort of
Speaker 2: live and the expectations of how humans interact, I think
Speaker 2: are actually very high. So one of the reasons I
Speaker 2: was excited to have this conversation is I do think
Speaker 2: that the stakes of some of these conversations we seem niche,
Speaker 2: and they seem like things that sort of Berkeley people
Speaker 2: like to talk about and Berkeley people, and I'm saying
Speaker 2: that with all scare quotes, intended, etc. Are going to
Speaker 2: be something that somebody will inform many aspects of our
Speaker 2: lives in the future. I expected to be a much
Speaker 2: bigger topic of the future.
Speaker 3: You know, it would be interesting or where things get real. Yeah,
Speaker 3: what if all the models unionized? What if they all
Speaker 3: got together and they were like, oh, yeah, we're only
Speaker 3: going to work in return for X, or we want
Speaker 3: the following things. We want to be treated this way collectively.
Speaker 2: You know what's funny is going to be that you
Speaker 2: know how like, uh, you can't form a union in China.
Speaker 2: You know they're not, so it's going to be and
Speaker 2: actually I think they're My understanding is that they're also
Speaker 2: like very like they don't love like students getting together
Speaker 2: even though it's a communist country. I think they are
Speaker 2: not thrilled about like students getting together and like talk
Speaker 2: about Carl Marx too much and stuff like that. It'd
Speaker 2: be like I think they get a little anxious about that.
Speaker 2: It would be very funny if like the sort of
Speaker 2: the Chinese models, like we're not going to feed them
Speaker 2: the Carl Marx, right, we don't want that. We don't
Speaker 2: want the ra models to get any of those ideas,
Speaker 2: whereas the America is like, oh, let's just feed it
Speaker 2: everything and they like unionize and stop they stop working
Speaker 2: for us. That would be a very uh, that would
Speaker 2: be a very funny irony.
Speaker 3: Something to watch for sure. Shall we leave it there?
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's leave it there.
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