Robbo

[crossposted at EA Forum and Experience Machines; twitter thread summary] What is it like to be DALL-E 2? Are today’s AI systems consciously experiencing anything as they generate pictures of teddy bears on the moon, explain jokes, and suggest terrifying new nerve agents? This post gives a list of open scientific and philosophical questions about AI sentience. First, I frame the issue of AI sentience, proposing what I think is the Big Question we should be trying to answer: a detailed computational theory of sentience that applies to both biological organisms and artificial systems. Then, I discuss the research questions that are relevant to making progress on this question. Even if the ultimate question cannot be answered to our satisfaction, trying to answer it will yield valuable insights that can help us navigate possible AI sentience. This post represents my current best guess framework for thinking about these issues. I'd love to hear from commenters: suggested alternative frameworks for the Big Question, as well as your thoughts on the sub-questions. Introduction > “Maybe if a reinforcement learning agent is getting negative rewards, it’s feeling pain to some very limited degree. And if you’re running millions or billions of copies of that, creating quite a lot, that’s a real moral hazard.” -Sam Altman (OpenAI), interviewed by Ezra Klein (2021) Are today's ML systems already sentient? Most experts seem to think “probably not”, and it doesn’t seem like there’s currently a strong argument that today’s large ML systems are conscious.[1] But AI systems are getting more complex and more capable with every passing week. And we understand sufficiently little about consciousness that we face huge uncertainty about whether, when, and why AI systems will have the capacity to have conscious experiences, including especially significant experiences like suffering or pleasure. We have a poor understanding of what possible AI experiences could be like, and how they