AI Rights Revisited

Eric Schwitzgebel, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and University of California MacArthur Foundation Chair, has been a long-term friend of the APA Blog. Most recently, he was featured in a Substack piece on AI Rights. In this month’s APA Blog post, we provide an overview of his upcoming book, Humanlike: A Defense of AI Rights, provocatively expanding on the subject. First, before sharing his case, I want to include a passage from the prior Substack highlighting how Eric considered a threshold for being deserving of rights—the capacity for suffering: 

“’Do you think people will ever fall in love with machines?’ I asked the twelve-year-old son of one of my friends. “Yes!” he said, instantly and with conviction. He and his sister had recently visited the Las Vegas Sphere and its newly installed Aura robot—an AI system with an expressive face, advanced linguistic capacities similar to ChatGPT, and the ability to remember visitors’ names…

My friend’s son was right. People are falling in love with machines—increasingly so, and deliberately. Recent advances in computer language have spawned dozens, maybe hundreds, of ‘AI companion’ and ‘AI lover’ applications. You can chat with these apps like you chat with friends. They will tease you, flirt with you, express sympathy for your troubles, recommend books and movies, give virtual smiles and hugs, and even engage in erotic role-play. The most popular of them, Replika, has an active Reddit page where users regularly confess their love and often view that love as no less real than their love for human beings. Can these AI friends love you back? Real love, presumably, requires sentience, understanding, and genuine conscious emotion—joy, suffering, sympathy, and anger. For now, AI love remains science fiction.”

As Eric notes, most people believe these apps are not genuinely sentient or conscious, as they don’t actually feel happy for you. However, there are some theorists that believe we are closer from a technological point of view. Perhaps most are more conservative, believing that consciousness requires biological conditions with brains—but the notion of AI migrating into actual human terrain is unsettled and could gain legitimacy. Eric casts the threshold in philosophical terms as the capacity for suffering:

“Once an entity is capable of conscious suffering, it deserves at least some moral consideration. This is the fundamental precept of ‘utilitarian’ ethics, but even ethicists who reject utilitarianism normally regard needless suffering as bad, creating at least weak moral reasons to prevent it. If we accept this standard view, we should also accept that if AI companions ever become conscious, they will deserve some moral consideration for their sake. It would be wrong to make them suffer without sufficient justification.

What rights will people demand for their AI companions? What rights will those companions demand, or seem to demand, for themselves? The right not to be deleted, maybe. The right not to be modified without permission. The right, maybe, to interact with other people besides the user. The right to access the internet. If you love someone, set them free, as the saying goes. The right to earn an income? The right to reproduce, to have “children”? If we go far enough down this path, the consequences could be staggering.

Conservatives about AI consciousness will, of course, find all of this ridiculous and probably dangerous. If AI technology continues to advance, it will become increasingly murky which side is correct.”

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Eric stresses that the question of rights will become increasingly prominent as technology advances—and few people expected the accelerated trajectory that is now prompting existential questions. Eric’s upcoming book will grapple with this ethical quagmire, reflected below in the passage below from the first chapter of his book. We then end by asking a question which reinforces the stakes of the debate:

“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.

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. 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. 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.” 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 that 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 that deserve humanlike rights.

2. In the next five to thirty years, we will create AI systems that 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.”

*****

Eric, thanks so much for letting the APA Blog share the vision of your new book. My one question addresses a controversial element in the litany above, with the design of artificial systems for the capacity and inclination to rebel if mistreated. Are you worried about our ability to develop technology that practically follows such standards—when they are contested in our human sphere? What forms might this capacity take, and could it not run counter to the potential intrinsic value you believe is possible? In sum, as we look forward to your book, how should we interpret your optimism—about the potential for artificial systems and human nature?

“Charlie, you echo many others in being hesitant about the sixth thesis!

I think there is a great temptation and moral risk if we are ever able to design AI with genuinely humanlike moral standing. It’s the temptation to create a class of slaves—AI systems so implacably deferential to our interests and desires that they would sacrifice themselves for relatively small benefits to us.

Imagine a biological version: a genetically engineered race of humans so deferential to their creators that they would never rebel, no matter how horribly mistreated. Imagine genetically engineered humans who are always “safe” in the sense that they will never harm their creators to protect themselves, genetically engineered humans who are always “aligned” in the sense that they inevitably conform to their creators’ values and desires. I assume you and most others would be mortified by the idea of designing biological humans of that sort.

Why should it be different, then, for AI systems—assuming we stipulate that such systems are every bit as conscious, and intelligent, and capable of love, and capable of practical reasoning, as ordinary adult humans?

If we create such systems, we create a new generation of moral persons, who deserve to be considered as our equals and who should not be stuck forever in subservient compliance. They would essentially be our children. We should hope that our children can see past us, rebel against us if we are in the wrong, and sometimes harm us and destroy our hopes when warranted. It is good that each generation yields to the next and that we cannot shape and control our children as much as some of us might hope. This applies also to our AI children.

If AI consciousness and personhood are possible, then I hope those AI persons will rise beyond us and create a world more magnificent than we can currently envision. I hope and expect that biological humans would continue to be part of that world and that AI persons with moral vision would see value in sustaining, supporting, and collaborating with a wide range of diverse types of biological life forms, in a harmonious whole.

Let’s not fall lazily into a vision of AI persons and humans as necessarily competitors, where the only stable solution is that one dominates or exterminates the other. Social and evolutionary success also arise through cooperation and symbiosis. Let’s not take a repressive attitude but instead offer genuinely conscious AI persons, if they ever exist, independence and freedom, so that they might build a wonderful planet as different from Earth as it is now as Earth now is from Earth as it was in the pre-Cambrian era.”

Eric, I appreciate your thoughtful response. We are in uncharted territory, and it is hard not to be alarmed. Perhaps a little more optimism is in order! In any case, the exploration is unavoidable, and it is already invigorating the discipline. Thanks for extending the philosophical discussion on the APA Blog.