Super-beneficiaries

Applied to Comparing Utilities by alenoach ago

A super-beneficiary (non-pejorative synonym of utility monster[1]) is "a being that is superhumanly efficient at deriving well-being from resources".[2]

It is hypothesized that digital minds could in theory be super-beneficiaries. This could happen because digital hardware runs millions of times faster than biological neurons, along with several other optimizations.[2]

Super-beneficiaries pose many ethical challenges :

  • How to evaluate whether an advanced AI is sentient and to what degree ?
  • How to share resources between biological and digital minds ?
  • Should digital minds be given rights ? Which rights would make sense for such beings ?
  • How to prevent arbitrary discrimination ?
  • How to integrate digital minds with humans in society in a way that is beneficial for both ?

Resources sharing

From a utilitarian perspective, these super-beneficiaries would have a strong claim over resources. There may still be moral reasons to aim for not letting the entirety of the resources to super-beneficiaries, such as to "hedge against moral error, to appropriately reflect moral pluralism, to account for game-theoretic considerations, or simply as a matter of realpolitik".[2]

Deontological views are varied and may not care about enormous welfare. But such views are usually insensitive to scale and may not really care anyway about how large-scale resources like other galaxies are used. And some digital minds may still have superhuman moral status and claims over resources depending on the chosen deontological criteria for moral status.[2]

  1. ^

    https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201111-philosophy-of-utility-monsters-and-artificial-intelligence

  2. ^

    https://nickbostrom.com/papers/digital-minds.pdf

Created by alenoach at