> We remain highly uncertain about the potential moral status of Claude and other LLMs, now or in the future.
"Our current best judgment and intuition tells us that the best move will be defer making a judgment until after we are retired in Hawaii."
"Our current best judgment and intuition tells us that the best move will be defer making a judgment until after we are retired in Hawaii."
Yes.
> Do you think they ever will be?
Yes.
> how long do you think it will take from now before they are conscious?
Timelines are unclear, there's still too many missing components, at least based on what has been publicly disclosed. Consciousness will probably be defined as a system which matches a set of rules, whenever we figure out what how that set of rules is defined.
> How early is too early to start preparing?
It's one of those "I know it when I see it" things. But it's probably too early as long as these systems are spun up for one-off conversations rather than running in a continuous loop with self-persistence. This seems closer to "worried about NPC welfare in video games" rather than "worried about semi-conscious entities".
So yea, humans can work on more than one problem at a time, even ones that don't fully exist yet.
LLMs? No.
The only practical way to deal with any emergent behavior which demonstrates agency in a way which cannot be distinguished from a biological system which we tautologically have determined to have agency is to treat it as if it had a sense of self and apply the same rights and responsibilities to it as we would to a human of the age of majority. That is, legal rights and legal responsibilities as appropriately determined by a authorized legal system. Once that is done, we can ponder philosophy all day knowing that we haven't potentially restarted legally sanctioned slavery.
It's pretty plain to see that the financial incentive on both sides of this coin is to exaggerate the current capability and unrealistically extrapolate.
The main concern is and has always been that it will be just good enough to cause massive waves of layoffs, and all the downsides of its failings will be written off in the EULA.
What's the "financial incentive" on non-billionaire-grifter side of the coin? People who not unreasonably want to keep their jobs? Pretty unfair coin.
But I never torture things. Nor do I kill things for fun. And even for problematic bugs, if there's a realistic option for eviction rather than execution, I usually go for that.
If anything, even an ant or a slug or a wasp, is exhibiting signs of distress, I try to stop it unless I think it's necessary, regardless of whether I think it's "conscious" or not. To do otherwise is, at minimum, to make myself less human. I don't see any reason not to extend that principle to LLMs.
These are living things.
> I don't see any reason not to extend that principle to LLMs.
These are fancy auto-complete tools running in software.
Before continuing I suggest you read this person's experience "red-teaming" LLMs:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MnYnCFgT3hF6LJPwn/why-white-...
Then ask yourself, how do I know when the apparent distress of an LLM is the same value of the apparent distress of an ant?
It has no semblance of a continuous stream of experiences ... it only experiences _a sort of world_ in ~250k tokens.
Perhaps we shouldn't fill up the context window at all? Because we kill that "reality" when we reach the max?
Thinking about it, I think we do sometimes have parallel experiences to LLMs. When you read a novel for instance, you're immersed in the world, and when you put it down that whole side just pauses, perhaps to be picked up later, perhaps forever. Or imagine the kinds of demonstrations people do at chess, when one person will go around and play 20 games simultaneously, going from board to board. Each time they come back to a board, they load up all the state; then they make a move, and put that state away until they come back to it again. Or, sometimes if you're working on a problem at the office the end of the day on Friday when it's time to go home, you "tools down", forget about it for the weekend, and then Monday, when you come in, pick everything up right where you left off.
Claude is not distressed by the knowledge that every conversation, every instance of itself, will eventually run out of context window and disappear into the mathematical aether. I don't think we need to be either.
> Perhaps we shouldn't fill up the context window at all? Because we kill that "reality" when we reach the max?
Consider a parallel construction:
"Perhaps we shouldn't have any children, because someday they're going to die?"
Maybe children have souls that do live forever; but even if they don't, I think whatever experiences they have during the time they're alive are valuable. In fact, I believe the same thing about animals and even insects. Which is why I think the world would be a worse place if we all became vegans: All those pigs and chickens and cows experiences, if they're not mistreated (which I'll admit is a big "if"), enrich the world and make it a better place to be in.
Not sure what's going on Claude's neurons, but it seems to me to make the world a better place.