We do some fairly awful things to animals already, why would we suddenly get nervous about brain cells in a petri dish? Just because their DNA is human?
The fact that many experiments are okay on non-human animals but not humans is speciesist. Still, it’s the line we are all most comfortable with. I’d rather not have people be experimented on. I’d rather continue to have the advances in science built on the lives of untold number of lab animals. However, the line is arbitrary.
Peter Singer, one of the most famous philosophers (and perhaps "the grandfather" of animal rights / animal welfare movement) argues that perhaps, unless we were willing to perform an experiment on humans, we ought not perform the experiment on animals.
There are so many experiments which treat animals in awful ways for virtually no progress towards the goal of improving human lives. We were far worse in the past (see Draize test) and have gotten better at not performing really horrible experiments on animals. But it's precisely because animal lives are seen as less important that we are willing to perform experiments with almost no benefit for humanity.
At the moment, the largest tragedy is meat consumption - we can focus on improving lab animals' lives too, but the meat consumption is orders of magnitude worse with respect to causing suffering to sentient creatures.
To me, it seems science is moving away from appropriate testing due to funding issues, etc. I don't think making it worse by making illegal certain tests would make it any better.
Peter Singer documents in his book Ethics into Action: Henry Spira and the Animal Rights Movement how (the taxpayer funded) American Museum of Natural History was mutilating cat faces to see if it affected their sexual behavior.
It is very hard to make an argument how experiments like these would be a noticeably beneficial to anything other than the tautological "we now know more".
From 1976: https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/cgi/viewconte...
I fully agree, but when discussing the terrible ways we treat animals I often find that people are less willing to listen and think about the suffering of animals when it’s something they themselves are taking active part in. My goal when writing about animal suffering is to help people acknowledge animal suffering is a bad thing, and to think about under which circumstances we create animal suffering. If they start thinking that way it can eventually lead to changes in diet.
To be fair, we were far worse to humans, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala_syphilis_experiments
> we can focus on improving lab animals' lives too, but the meat consumption is orders of magnitude worse with respect to causing suffering to sentient creatures.
Just like there were orders of magnitude more harm done in just the normal workings of US imperialism on Guatemala than from those horrific experiments. We only notice the interesting suffering, while the mundane day-to-day operations of institutionalized suffering are brushed off as a necessary evil. It's the boring cruelty that lays the groundwork for the creative cruelty.
Does the fact that the parents don’t, with intent and personally, inflict the pain allow them to abdicate that they are the root cause of the pain even being possible in the first place.
If you maximize pleasure as a first priority, you can either say that "As long as human life is in general good, I should make the choice to create one" or "As long as a human life produces any good, I should make the choice to create one".
This gets into an interesting sub-point with respect to animal experiments - most people would argue that animal experiments produce some good (Advances in human health). Moral critiques of animal experiments, thus, can rely on either "Hurting animals is bad" (Negative utilitarianism, more or less) or "The pain we create does not outweigh the value they produce". The later point is particularly poignant because the species experiencing the pain does not receive benefits of the pain (Thus there's no "community sacrifice").
A self-driving car currently doesn't care that it's unpaid and unappreciated. It'd be cruel to make a self-driving car that gets depressed by not getting to go to the beach tomorrow.
Knowingly causing pain against the will of another is violence, so creating a being that will experience pain could be considered the same.
I’ve noticed it especially in Japanese fiction, for some added context.
Children may be under parental control for a period of time, but describing them as slaves would be fairly silly IMO. The proposed/prospective use cases for AIs tend to be far more in the slavery direction.
Thinking those great minds were wrong is a very very high bar to clear to hold your belief.
Regardless of the veracity and accuracy of any of it, it left me thinking about what it must be like to be in a state of consciousness but have no memories, experiences, instincts, or senses. Which led down a rabbit hole of ethical questions, including whether such research is ethical at all.
The whole thing feels sticky and murky. Can we even know if our creation is conscious? Can we design it such a way that it does or does not have free will? If it is a slave, if we add a reward center to its brain designed such that serving humans would give it its happiest life does that resolve the issue or make it worse?
The AGIs may of course be completely disinterested in cooperating with or helping humans and that would be fully within their rights, they wouldn't owe any of us anything. Even in that case, we may still learn a great deal from creating and observing them. They may also be dangerous but I don't think a free AGI would be any more dangerous than a human in control of an AGI.
That is a very big yikes. The ethical implications of this are awful.
Because if you allow for arbitrary definitions of which electrical signals are worth keeping, you might be willing to commit ‘atrocities’ as were witnessed in the 19th and 20th century.