EA - Digital Minds: Importance and Key Research Questions by Andreas Mogensen

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: Digital Minds: Importance and Key Research Questions, published by Andreas Mogensen on July 3, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
by Andreas Mogensen, Bradford Saad, and Patrick Butlin
1. Introduction
This post summarizes why we think that digital minds might be very important for how well the future goes, as well as some of the key research topics we think it might be especially valuable to work on as a result.
We begin by summarizing the case for thinking that digital minds could be important. This is largely a synthesis of points that have already been raised elsewhere, so readers who are already familiar with the topic might want to skip ahead to section 3, where we outline what we see as some of the highest-priority open research questions.
2. Importance
Let's define a digital mind as a conscious individual whose psychological states are due to the activity of an inorganic computational substrate as opposed to a squishy brain made up of neurons, glia, and the like.[1] By 'conscious', we mean 'phenomenally conscious.' An individual is phenomenally conscious if and only if there is something it is like to be that individual - something it feels like to inhabit their skin, exoskeleton, chassis, or what-have-you.
In the sense intended here, there is something it is like to be having the kind of visual or auditory experience you're probably having now, to feel a pain in your foot, or to be dreaming, but there is nothing it is like to be in dreamless sleep.
Digital minds obviously have an air of science fiction about them. If certain theories of consciousness are true (e.g., Block 2009; Godfrey-Smith 2016), digital minds are impossible. However, other theories suggest that they are possible (e.g. Tye 1995, Chalmers 1996), and many others are silent on the matter.
While the authors of this post disagree about the plausibility of these various theories, we agree that the philosophical position is too uncertain to warrant setting aside the possibility of digital minds.[2]
Even granting that digital minds are possible in principle, it's unlikely that current systems are conscious. A recent expert report co-authored by philosophers, neuroscientists, and AI researchers (including one of the authors of this post) concludes that the current evidence "does not suggest that any existing AI system is a strong candidate for consciousness." (Butlin et al.
2023: 6) Still, some residual uncertainty seems to be warranted - and obviously completely consistent with denying that any current system is a "strong candidate". Chalmers (2023) suggests it may be reasonable to give a probability in the ballpark of 5-10% to the hypothesis that current large language models could be conscious. Moreover, the current rate of progress in artificial intelligence gives us good reason to take seriously the possibility that digital minds will arrive soon.
Systems appearing in the next decade might add a range of markers of consciousness, and Chalmers suggests the probability that we'll have digital minds within this time-frame might rise to at least 25%.[3] Similarly, Butlin et al. (2023) conclude that if we grant the assumption that consciousness can be realized by implementing the right computations, then "conscious AI systems could realistically be built in the near term."[4]
It's possible that digital minds might arrive but exist as mere curiosities. Perhaps the kind of architectures that give rise to phenomenal consciousness will have little or no commercial value. We think it's reasonable to be highly uncertain on this point (see Butlin et al. 2023: §4.2 for discussion).
Still, it's worth noting that some influential AI researchers have been pursuing projects that aim to increase AI capabilities by building systems that exhibit markers of consciousness, like a global workspace (Goyal and Bengi...