EA - Principles for AI Welfare Research by jeffsebo

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Principles for AI Welfare Research, published by jeffsebo on June 19, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Tl;dr: This post, which is part of the EA Strategy Fortnight series, summarizes some of my current views about the importance of AI welfare, priorities for AI welfare research, and principles for AI welfare research.1. IntroductionAs humans start to take seriously the prospect of AI consciousness, sentience, and sapience, we also need to take seriously the prospect of AI welfare. That is, we need to take seriously the prospect that AI systems can have positive or negative states like pleasure, pain, happiness, and suffering, and that if they do, then these states can be good or bad for them.A world that includes the prospect of AI welfare is a world that requires the development of AI welfare research. Researchers need to examine whether and to what extent AI systems might have the capacity for welfare. And to the extent that they might, researchers need to examine what might be good or bad for AI systems and what follows for our actions and policies.The bad news is that AI welfare research will be difficult. Many researchers are likely to be skeptical of this topic at first. And even insofar as we take the topic seriously, it will be difficult for us to know what, if anything, it might be like to be an AI system. After all, the only mind that we can directly access is our own, and so our ability to study other minds is limited at best.The good news is that we have a head start. Researchers have spent the past half century making steady progress in animal welfare research. And while there are many potentially relevant differences between animals and AI systems, there are also many potentially relevant similarities – enough for it to be useful for us to look to animal welfare research for guidance.In Fall 2022, we launched the NYU Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program, which examines the nature and intrinsic value of nonhuman minds, with special focus on invertebrates and AI systems. In this post, I summarize some of my current views about the importance of AI welfare, priorities for AI welfare research, and principles for AI welfare research.I want to emphasize that this post discusses these issues in a selective and general way. A comprehensive treatment of these issues would need to address many more topics in much more detail. But I hope that this discussion can be a useful starting point for researchers who want to think more deeply about what might be good or bad for AI systems in the future.I also want to emphasize that this post expresses my current, tentative views about this topic. It might not reflect the views of other people at the NYU Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program or of other experts in effective altruism, global priorities research, and other relevant research, advocacy, or policy communities. It might not even reflect my own views a year from now.Finally, I want to emphasize that AI welfare is only one of many topics that merit more attention right now. Many other topics merit more attention too, and this post makes no specific claims about relative priorities. I simply wish to claim that AI welfare research should be among our priorities, and to suggest how we can study and promote AI welfare in a productive way.2. Why AI welfare mattersWe can use the standard EA scale-neglectedness-tractability framework to see why AI welfare matters. The general idea is that there could be many more digital minds than biological minds in the future, humanity is currently considering digital minds much less than biological minds, and humanity might be able to take steps to treat both kinds of minds well.First, AI welfare is potentially an extremely large-scale issue. In the same way that the invertebrate population is much larger than the vertebrate p...