Today's post, Can't Unbirth a Child was originally published on 28 December 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

As a piece of meta advice for how to act when you have more power than you probably should, avoid doing things that cannot be undone. Creating a new sentient being is one of those things to avoid. If you need to rewrite the source code of a nonsentient optimization process, this is less morally problematic than rewriting the source code of a sentient intelligence who doesn't want to be rewritten. Creating new life forms creates such massive issues that it's really better to just not try, at least until we know a lot more.

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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Nonsentient Optimizers, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

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