The Sentience Institute Podcast Sentience Institute
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- Science
Interviews with activists, social scientists, entrepreneurs and change-makers about the most effective strategies to expand humanity’s moral circle, with an emphasis on expanding the circle to farmed animals. Host Jamie Harris, a researcher at moral expansion think tank Sentience Institute, takes a deep dive with guests into advocacy strategies from political initiatives to corporate campaigns to technological innovation to consumer interventions, and discusses advocacy lessons from history, sociology, and psychology.
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Eric Schwitzgebel on user perception of the moral status of AI
“I call this the emotional alignment design policy. So the idea is that corporations, if they create sentient machines, should create them so that it's obvious to users that they're sentient. And so they evoke appropriate emotional reactions to sentient users. So you don't create a sentient machine and then put it in a bland box that no one will have emotional reactions to. And conversely, don't create a non sentient machine that people will attach to so much and think it's sentient that they...
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Raphaël Millière on large language models
“Ultimately, if you want more human-like systems that exhibit more human-like intelligence, you would want them to actually learn like humans do by interacting with the world and so interactive learning, not just passive learning. You want something that's more active where the model is going to actually test out some hypothesis, and learn from the feedback it's getting from the world about these hypotheses in the way children do, it should learn all the time. If you observe young babies and ...
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Matti Wilks on human-animal interaction and moral circle expansion
“Speciesism being socially learned is probably our most dominant theory of why we think we're getting the results that we're getting. But to be very clear, this is super early research. We have a lot more work to do. And it's actually not just in the context of speciesism that we're finding this stuff. So basically we've run some studies showing that while adults will prioritize humans over even very large numbers of animals in sort of tragic trade-offs, children are much more likely to prior...
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David Gunkel on robot rights
“Robot rights are not the same thing as a set of human rights. Human rights are very specific to a singular species, the human being. Robots may have some overlapping powers, claims, privileges, or immunities that would need to be recognized by human beings, but their grouping or sets of rights will be perhaps very different.”David GunkelCan and should robots and AI have rights? What’s the difference between robots and AI? Should we grant robots rights even if they aren’t sentient? What might...
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Kurt Gray on human-robot interaction and mind perception
“And then you're like, actually, I can't know what it's like to be a bat—again, the problem of other minds, right? There's this fundamental divide between a human mind and a bat, but at least a bat's a mammal. What is it like to be an AI? I have no idea. So I think [mind perception] could make us less sympathetic to them in some sense because it's—I don't know, they're a circuit board, there are these algorithms, and so who knows? I can subjugate them now under the heel of human desire becaus...
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Thomas Metzinger on a moratorium on artificial sentience development
And for an applied ethics perspective, I think the most important thing is if we want to minimize suffering in the world, and if we want to minimize animal suffering, we should always, err on the side of caution, we should always be on the safe side. Thomas MetzingerShould we advocate for a moratorium on the development of artificial sentience? What might that look like, and what would be the challenges?Thomas Metzinger was a full professor of theoretical philosophy at the Johannes Guten...