Digital minds & how to avoid sleepwalking into a major moral catastrophe | Jeff Sebo (2023)

Originally released November 2023. Luisa Rodriguez interviews Jeff Sebo — director of the Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program at NYU — about preparing for a world with digital minds.

Learn more and see the full transcript on the 80,000 Hours website: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episod...

Chapters:
• Cold open (00:00:00)
• Luisa's intro (00:01:16)
• The interview begins (00:02:45)
• We should extend moral consideration to some AI systems by 2030 (00:06:41)
• A one-in-1,000 threshold (00:15:23)
• What does moral consideration mean? (00:24:36)
• Hitting the threshold by 2030 (00:27:38)
• Is the threshold too permissive? (00:38:24)
• The Rebugnant Conclusion (00:41:00)
• A world where AI experiences could matter more than human experiences (00:52:33)
• Should we just accept this argument? (00:55:13)
• Searching for positive-sum solutions (01:05:41)
• Are we going to sleepwalk into causing massive amounts of harm to AI systems? (01:13:48)
• Discourse and messaging (01:27:17)
• What will AI systems want and need? (01:31:17)
• Copies of digital minds (01:33:20)
• Connected minds (01:40:26)
• Psychological connectedness and continuity (01:49:58)
• Assigning responsibility to connected minds (01:58:41)
• Counting the wellbeing of connected minds (02:02:36)
• Legal personhood and political citizenship (02:09:49)
• Building the field of AI welfare (02:24:03)
• What we can learn from improv comedy (02:29:29)

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