Ezra Hale Series on AI: Schwitzgebel on "Puzzles about the Moral Status of AI Systems"
Moderator: Irina Mikhalevich (Philosophy, RIT)
Eric Schwitzgebel (University of California, Riberside)
Abstract: Within the next decade or two, we are likely to create AI systems that some people, rightly or wrongly, think are conscious and deserve rights. To determine whether such systems really do deserve rights, we will need both to evaluate the extent if any of their consciousness and to think through the proper ethical bases of rights or moral considerability. Both issues are unlikely to be resolved anytime soon. The likely outcome is a catastrophic dilemma: Either we treat AI systems as disposable property and risk perpetrating the moral equivalent of slavery and murder on potentially an immense scale (if liberals about AI consciousness and rights are in fact correct) or we give AI systems rights similar to the rights we give to human beings and risk sacrificing real human interests for entities without interests worth the sacrifice (if conservatives about AI consciousness about rights are in fact correct). The puzzles become even more baffling if we consider the diverse forms that AI systems might take, potentially very much unlike the forms of life that guided the development of all currently existing ethical systems and moral intuitions.
Bio. Dr. Schwitzgebel is a philosopher of mind and mind sciences at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of numerous books, including A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures, Perplexities of Consciousness, and the forthcoming The Weirdness of the World, as well as many edited volumes and nearly eighty substantial journal articles or anthology contributions in philosophy of mind, moral psychology, epistemology, Chinese philosophy, and the philosophy of technology.
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