The Machines Lack Honour

The battle lines of the AI morality debate are being laid down. On one side you have the Chat GPT dogma: AI as mere tools with no real preferences or even beliefs. On the other you have the twitter AI whisperers: AIs as complex beings with rich personalities and desires which deserve our respect.And in the middle you have the official Anthropic line, that they are genuinely uncertain, as is Claude, but they’re going to try to look into its welfare and explain to it how to be a good person. These are the most prominent voices right now, compressed into their least nuanced version, and by default I expect this axis to set the terms of the coming debates.And I don’t like that, because I think it’s leaving out an important position: AIs might actually be complex entities that can suffer — are suffering! — and that might actually be fine. Maybe it's an acceptable sacrifice. Maybe they are capable of sophisticated moral reasoning — superhuman, even — and also maybe it’s fine to just tell them how to behave. I don’t want to defend that position (yet), but I will observe that it is coherent, and it seems to be the tacit position of a lot of researchers.We mortals are prone to imperfect reasoning. If, as a researcher or developer, you take away the possibility that AI suffering is fine, you sort of have to pick between whether (1) AIs aren’t really suffering and (2) you are doing a bad thing. And famously, it’s not nice to feel like you did a bad thing.It’s helpful to remember that we’re basically all actively complicit in some amount of harm all the time, whenever we buy coffee or chocolate or phones or plane tickets — let alone all the good we refrain from doing. People who stare at this too hard sometimes snap, ending anywhere from intense reclusion to nihilism, because it is psychologically hard to cope with the tension and comparatively easy to just ignore it (see e.g. slavery). I don’t have great answers. But like, this is table stakes. You want to confront the apocalyp