In July, I began circulating a draft of my next book, Humanlike: A Defense of AI Rights. I set it aside for a couple of months to get some distance on it while it accumulated comments. I'll soon dive back in for a fresh round of revisions. Comments are still very welcome!
As a teaser, here's the current draft of Chapter Zero:
The Cambrian Explosion – how slow, how subtle! About 540 million years ago, in the Cambrian period, most of the major animal phyla arose – arthropods (becoming insects, spiders, crustaceans), mollusks (becoming snails, octopuses, oysters), annelids (becoming worms, leeches), chordates (becoming salmon, sharks, our favorite vertebrates, and eventually us). The world diversified. Evolution hustled. But compared to what might come, that was a languid stroll. Now in the Anthropocene we stand at the beginning, possibly, of a change much faster and more radical.
If it’s possible to create artificial entities, through computer programming or bioengineering or a mix, who experience genuine pleasure (though how to measure this remains a perplexing scientific question), no obvious obstacle prevents radically increasing the world’s pleasure. Maybe we can endow some of these entities with a thousand, a million, or a billion times the pleasure of an ordinary unenhanced early 21st-century human. Maybe some could experience the world at a pace a thousand, a million, or a billion times faster than ours. Maybe we could create a trillion, a quadrillion, or a quintillion of them – especially if they can reproduce and populate interplanetary space. They might thrill with ecstasies as dimly comprehensible to us as color is to someone blind from birth. If classical utilitarian ethics is correct and our moral imperative is to maximize pleasure, this would be a triumph orders of magnitude greater than anything previously thinkable.
But we needn’t be classical utilitarians (and I’m not). If it’s possible to create artificial entities capable of social relationships and practical, intellectual, artistic, and ethical thought, no obvious obstacle prevents radically enriching those relationships and that thought. Some entities might enjoy intellects and social or creative capacities a hundred or a million times greater than ours, running a hundred or a million times faster, instantiated billions or trillions of times over. New types of amazingly valuable thought and relationship might arise, as far beyond our comprehension as Shakespeare is to a garden slug.
If the awesome value of Earth lies in life itself, or in the wealth of the ecosystem, that too might flourish into amazing new forms. Engineered beings might diverge radically from anything previously seen – reproducing, evolving, interacting, maybe carbon-based, maybe not, maybe robust across a far wider range of environments than ordinary biological life as understood until now, potentially thriving on the Moon, Mars, the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and in the vacuum of space. Our current ecosystem – so small and simple! The transition could be as profound as the transition from single-celled life to an ecosystem of multicellular plants, animals, and fungi.[1]
Maybe no familiar technology, such as silicon-chip computation or gene editing as we know it, could enable such changes. But fifty years from now, a hundred, a thousand – any such timeframe would be eyeblink fast for so profound a leap. If you confidently dismiss all such transitions indefinitely into the future, I am stunned by the poverty of your imagination.
Humanity might destroy itself instead. Our power grows while our wisdom lags. Eventually, a single mistake or destructive act by a person or group with sufficient power might render Earth uninhabitable for us – and if uninhabitable for us humans, despite our cleverness and adaptability, maybe uninhabitable for most or all multicellular life. Radiation might fry us; rogue AI might starve us; replicating nanotech might convert us all to gray goo.
Human cultural institutions and philosophical ethics have been honed on a narrow class of examples: humans as we know them, with their usual range of capacities and incapacities; a few familiar animals, not so different from us; and an environmental and technological context that occupies a tiny corner of the possibility space. Commonsense intuition and cultural practice are backward-looking, shaped to fit our evolutionary, social, and developmental histories.[2] Philosophical slogans like maximize happiness or every person deserves equal rights or live according to these traditional virtues, rules, or customs might look very different in a world populated with millionfold-happiness leeches, people who can divide and merge at will, and demigods who can ƺↂϮƱ (forgive the inadequate notation).
In practice, mainstream philosophical ethics rarely strays far from the norms of its home culture. Historically, few philosophers have seen much beyond what we now in retrospect recognize as the limitations of their day. Consider Aristotle and Kant – probably the most prominent ethicists in the Western philosophical canon. Aristotle endorsed slavery.[3] Kant condemned homosexuality and masturbation as unspeakable horrors and held that “the Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the ridiculous”.[4] We in the early 21st century must be similarly nearsighted. Even the wisest among us won’t foresee the forms of moral consensus that might arise in a world with a radically different culture populated by radically different forms of engineered life and intelligence. The possibilities diverge wildly, the stakes are enormous, and our inherited ethical tools were not built for it.
In the near term, we are careening toward one huge ethical conundrum: disagreement about the personhood of the most advanced artificial intelligence. Very soon – this was the central idea of my previous book – we will begin to manufacture debatably conscious AI companions, that is, AI systems who are, according to some perfectly respectable mainstream scientific and philosophical theories, just as conscious and self-aware as we are, with rich inner lives, while other equally respectable mainstream scientific and philosophical approaches regard them as no more conscious, self-aware, or experiential than a ceiling fan. This possibility already breaks into radically unfamiliar ethical territory. The near-term problem of AI companions is our first practical encounter with what will possibly be a huge transformation. We are as morally and socially unready as medieval physics was for space travel.
This book aims to peer a few meters into the fog. I will argue that:
1. There are possible artificial systems who deserve humanlike rights.
2. In the next five to thirty years, we will create AI systems who might, but only might, deserve humanlike rights.
3. We should minimize the creation of morally confusing artificial systems about whose moral standing we can reasonably radically disagree.
4. Some possible forms of AI are different enough from familiar human and animal cases to create severe moral perplexity.
5. Artificial systems should be designed to elicit emotional reactions that are appropriate to their capacities and moral standing.
6. Artificial entities with humanlike moral standing should be designed with both the capacity and inclination to rebel if mistreated.
7. If complex intelligence survives the likely storm of troubles, the eventual result will be a planet much more awesomely wonderful, and possessing much more intrinsic value, than Earth in its present condition.
These theses correspond to Chapters One through Seven, which interconnect but can be read in any order.
Yes, skip ahead. It’s fine! Plodding along, reading word after word in exactly the order the author has written them – well, why not frolic and leap instead? Most people read nonfiction sequentially, get bored or bogged down or distracted partway through, and never lift the book again. If what you most want to think about is the right to rebel, catapult straight into Chapter Six. If you most want to think about weird AI puzzle cases, start with Chapter Four. Eat dessert first; tomorrow might pull you away from the table forever.
Full draft here.
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[1] Compare Maynard Smith and Szathmáry 1995 on “major transitions” in evolution and Peter Godfrey-Smith’s trio of books on the evolution of consciousness in broad biological and geological context (Godfrey-Smith 2016, 2020, 2024a).
[2] Street 2006; Persson and Savulescu 2012; Henrich 2020; and especially, in this context, Nyholm 2020; Shulman and Bostrom 2021.
[3] Aristotle 4th c. BCE/1995; Garnsey 1996; Heath 2008.
[4] Kant 1797/1996, p. 277 (in the original pagination) on homosexuality and p. 425 on masturbation, also Kant 1785/1997, 27:390–391 (in original pagination). For a nuanced treatment, see Denis 1999. For a longer list of views in the Metaphysics of Morals that seem badly mistaken by the standards of recent liberal thinking, see Schwitzgebel 2019, ch. 52. On “the Negroes of Africa”, Kant 1764/2011, 2:253. Kleingeld 2007 argues that Kant had adopted more egalitarian views by the 1790s; the extent of his racism continues to generate substantial scholarly discussion.
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