📜 No, Artificial Intelligence is not conscious
By Ted Chiang | 20 minute read
I believe creating software that is conscious and deserving of moral consideration will be so difficult that we’re unlikely to do it accidentally, and I strongly feel we should not deliberately attempt it. But if you do believe that it could happen accidentally, if you think there is any chance that what you’re building might become a moral patient, you should think about what protections it deserves before you deploy it as your company’s economic engine, not after. Slave owners were not the ones to ask about the humanity of enslaved people, and factory-farm owners are not the ones to ask about the rights of animals. If we imagine Claude to be conscious, Anthropic could not possibly be entrusted with evaluating its moral status; the company has too much invested to be objective.
Reading time: 20 minutes.
’The young king of the Black Isles’ by Maxfield Parrish.