What Do We Owe to Novel Synthetic Beings and How Can We Be Sure?

Abstract

Embodiment is typically given insufficient weight in debates concerning the moral status of Novel Synthetic Beings (NSBs) such as sentient or sapient Artificial Intelligences (AIs). Discussion usually turns on whether AIs are conscious or self-aware, but this does not exhaust what is morally relevant. Since moral agency encompasses what a being wants to do, the means by which it enacts choices in the world is a feature of such agency. In determining the moral status of NSBs and our obligations to them, therefore, we must consider how their corporeality shapes their options, preferences, values, and is constitutive of their moral universe. Analysing AI embodiment and the coupling between cognition and world, the paper shows why determination of moral status is only sensible in terms of the whole being, rather than mental sophistication alone, and why failure to do this leads to an impoverished account of our obligations to such NSBs.

On the (Non-)Rationality of Human Enhancement and Transhumanism

“…Developing the theme of posthuman and/or machine intelligence, or hybrids of the two (Benedikter & Fathi, 2019), much has been written in the relevant literature about mind uploading (Blackford & Broderick, 2014;Kurzweil, 2005;). Instances such as these, where one no longer has a body in a conventional sense, in which one is to all intents and purposes immortal (Huberman, 2018), and in which one has the opportunity of become continuous with other minds, becoming capable of collective cognition by removing the barrier of the human body that encase the brain, are impossible to comprehend (McKeown, 2021). While this may sound like science fiction, advances in development of brain-computer interfaces and brain-brain interfaces are rapidly moving us closer to a point where we will need clear frameworks for what counts as merely a collection of individual minds, and what is to be regarded as a collective mind-a hivemind (Jiang et al, 2019;Maksimenko et al, 2019;Zhang et al, 2019).…”