New Book in Draft! Humanlike: A Defense of AI Rights

Here. Comments welcomed, hoped for, treasured.

Over the past couple years I've been working on a pair of books, AI and Consciousness and Humanlike: A Defense of AI Rights. I began circulating AI and Consciousness last fall, and it should appear with Cambridge Elements soon. Both experts' and non-experts' comments were extremely helpful in revising. Thanks so much!

I'd like to similarly begin collecting comments on Humanlike, starting today. Any reader who gives comments on the whole book will receive an appreciatively signed copy when it appears in print, as well as (of course) a call-out in the acknowledgements section.

To those wondering about the apparent madness of working on two books at once: They're both short (30K and 50K words, respectively) -- really one good-size book in total. Also, more than half of Humanlike is synthesized and updated material from several published and forthcoming articles going back to 2015.

I see the books as a companion pair. AI and Consciousness is a skeptical overview of the cases for and against AI consciousness. I argue that neither the boosters nor the scoffers have compelling arguments. Consequently, we will probably soon (within five to thirty years) have AI systems who might be as richly conscious as human beings or that might be as experientially blank as toasters. We won't have good scientific or philosophical grounds to settle the question.

Humanlike explores the ethical consequences. The central theses are:

(1.) AI with humanlike consciousness would deserve humanlike rights.

(2.) AI whose humanlikeness is seriously debatable should not be created, since it will force us into a dilemma between possibly overattributing and possibly underattributing rights, with potentially catastrophic consequences either way.

(3.) Our intuitive and theoretical understandings of how to treat persons ethically, grounded as they are in a narrow range of familiar human cases, are likely to fail catastrophically when confronted with future AI systems with radically different lifeways -- for example who can divide, merge, overlap, and back themselves up.

We are as unready for conscious AI systems as medieval physicists were for spaceflight. Still, the eventual result of technological development, perhaps in the thousand-plus-year future, might be a planet so richly full of diverse sources of awesomely valuable existence that it resembles a new Cambrian Explosion.

Full text here.