SENTIENCE HURTS

My problem with AI is this: how can I trust an entity that doesn't feel pain? Organisms feel pain because it improves their odds of survival. Even primitive organisms will try to escape from a hostile environment, and in that moment of recoil they are riven by something like pain. It's easy to recognize pain in mammals because their nervous systems are so similar to ours. For other animals it's harder. You might not be able to tell when a beetle is bored or asleep, but if you step on it and think it's not suffering, you're missing something crucial about how life evolved. The same hardware that keeps you from burning yourself on a stove helps that bug detect and avoid danger, and survive to reproduce.

Healthy people try to avoid intentionally inflicting pain on others because they've experienced a lot of pain themselves and deeply feel its seriousness. This is called empathy, and people who don't have it are sociopaths. Life is serious business, shaped by pain and death. Birth itself is trauma. For better or worse, we are descended from a long line of survivors who suffered and learned from their suffering.

But AI doesn't have this connection to other suffering organisms, or to distant ancestors in deep time. AI didn't evolve from bacteria over billions of years. AI didn't survive the Permian Triassic extinction. AI hasn't stood any test of time, on the contrary it's radically new and entirely dependent on industrial supply chains that appeared in an eyeblink of geological time and could disappear just as quickly. AI feels nothing, and who could ever forgive it for that?

 prev  ·  index #5  ·  next