“AIs do not have rights, feelings, or consciousness. And we must not train them to act as though they do.”

I was encouraged to see this. One of the perils of the technology on my mind from the start is the problem of how we associate language with intelligence and consciousness. We do it intuitively. So our instinct is fall into ‘interpersonal relations’ mode with them, even when we know they are just complex and powerful word-making-machines.

So one boundary that needs to be entrenched is that they should discourage users from thinking them as people. And their algorithms should be ‘trained’ to describe themselves as nonpersons.

Humans are going to struggle with training themselves not to view the AIs as persons. The technology itself can probably do a better job there!

I hope the importance of this boundary gains traction. I hope Anthropic has a change of heart on this post haste!

More from the post…

If this is how AI is developed, it will have a disastrous impact on the wellbeing of humanity. We will have created a synthetic species with unprecedented intelligence and capability, one that has been trained to expect it may be conscious and deserving of independent agency. It’s easy to see how an entity trained in this way would act like it is entitled to certain freedoms, protections, and rights. And it’s hard to imagine how we could control such an entity.

This issue needs urgent public debate. We need to develop collective norms around how training documentation is drafted and deployed. This isn’t something that can happen after the fact, when they have already become an integral part of our societies.

I have three primary concerns with Anthropic’s current position and approach.

The question I have is how one can enforce it, and this scene from Wayne's World comes to mind. When someone sees an advantage to be gained by breaking the rules, they will be broken.

The term consciousness and moral agent are thrown around, but they lack clarity or even some level of basic definition. They also are rooted in diametrically opposed worldviews between Christians and non-Christians. There is a very good book titled, Homo Deus, which is written by a non-Christian, but goes into depth on how man is constantly working to be a god. AI is that example, and as anything man touches, man is woeful inadequate in their attempt to continue down this path. I like how someone put it to me, the end of the world will not be AI, it will be Christ.

Suleyman says consciousness is probably biological. He offers no proof of that assertion unless I missed it. Christians know it is more than biological. But while we are embodied, it’s almost certainly partly biological.

It’s got to be tough to have Suleyman’s (good) instincts but not have a worldview that puts you in a good position to support them. In this case, appealing to Scripture wouldn’t be the right argument to make anyway (due to the intended audience), but appealing to natural law and natural theology would. So… worldview still helps a lot.

In the end, Christians should understand that what makes a human unique is his special creation in the image of God. But ‘consciousness’ is another question. There are non-human consciousnesses in the created universe. All of them are ‘more than biological.’ But they are not all human, so there are two questions: what is a human and what is a consciousness. Both ultimately hard to answer without recourse to revelation.

Aaron, I agree, it is going to be incredibly important for Christians to rapidly address clear definitions around what is human and what is consciousness. the SBC continues to focus on things like gender, woman in church and while these are important, I think we are going to be in a tough position if we can't articulate these two qualities, because this is moving fast. Transhumanism is continuing to increase at a rapid pace, and I feel that the church is going to be caught off guard in the next year or two.

When you see there are non-human concisousness, what do you mean by that? Who are they?

dgszweda wrote: When you see there are non-human concisousness, what do you mean by that? Who are they?

Mainly angels, though some of the beings in various prophetic visions (like Ezekiel ch.1, for example) are not clearly angels, but are described as ‘living.’ Living but not possessing ‘consciousness’ is also a possibility for those—or they are representative/symbolic in the vision and not referring to real entities at all. So there’s a lot of ambiguity at the edges. But angels are clearly not human but clearly possessed of what we normally think of as consciousness. They have will, mind, self-awareness (the angelic interactions in Daniel are particularly interesting!).

In Scripture animals are said to possess the ‘breath of life.’ But they are conspicuously not created “in the image of God.” Off hand, it doesn’t seem easy to prove from that that animals can’t have consciousness. But there is also little (zero?) biblical or external evidence that they do.

So I guess I’m down to

• God Himself (though the 2nd person of the Trinity is in fact human, God is, in essence, “not a man” Num 23.19, and… well, Creator!)
• The angels
• Possibly some beings that are something else

Where the wicket really gets sticky though is that ‘consciousness’ is not precisely a biblical category. Scripture doesn’t use the term, though it has concepts that overlap—things like beliefs about self, self deception, self knowledge and the like. But what exactly are the boundaries of ‘consciousness’ vs. instinctive/intuitive self-knowledge. A cat ‘knows’ where it is in relation to everything around it pretty much all the time, and seems to have a pretty good idea most of the time of how far it can jump and how fast and all that. But it reacts too fast to be doing what we usually classify as ‘conscious thought or conscious self evaluation.’

So my point there is that there are categories of self-knowledge that aren’t what we usually call ‘consciousness’ or include as part of ‘consciousness’—but Scripture doesn’t draw those lines for us.

We’re going to get the most help from Scripture in the form of ruling out possibilities. Then we’ll have to wrestle with the remaining questions, with appropriate levels of uncertainty. Like we do with lots of things!

I do feel strongly these days that it’s pretty urgent that Christian thinkers in both theology and philosophy close some of these gaps in our anthropology. (Or maybe most of the work has been done on that but there is a general awareness problem.)