The Edge of Sentience

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is just one of some 400 stories he wrote.

He wrote something like 70 books and numerous other scripts, columns, and projects, including the original Star Trek episode, The City on the Edge of Forever, which is often counted among the best of the original series.

And speaking on the story in question here, I have no mouth and I'm a scream.

You know, I feel like there's a real live wire energy to the prose here.

But a couple of other notable examples include Colossus and D.F. Jones' Colossus trilogy.

The first novel published in 1966 and then was later in 1970 adapted into the film Colossus, The Forbin Project.

These books deal with a U.S. supercomputer placed in charge of the nation's nuclear arsenal that eventually merges with its Soviet counterpart and rules over the human race in order to protect the human species from itself.

That's interesting for how similar the premise is to something they discuss in I Have No Mouth and in some other killer AI stories that they come out of the Cold War.

And I guess there's some point in thinking about maybe in the distant future what sort of systems might create and like whether those might be conscious but um more important now is to think about well the sort of system that exists or that might come about in the next you know few decades that's that's like the um makes more sense to focus on that for now i suppose

right so that's my target so that's the target in the book and in most of my thinking so um most people would agree most most theorists who are specialists in the area would agree the current AI systems don't have a meaningful degree of consciousness such that they would deserve serious moral consideration like people or humans.

But what I think is going to happen in the next five to 30 years is that we will develop the capacity to create AI systems that Do meet the criteria for having a serious significant degree of consciousness Maybe as much consciousness as meaningful as an important as our own consciousness by some Leading scientific respectable scientific and philosophical theories theories that we can't rule out as fringe or as ridiculous whereas obviously refuted and And at the same time, according to other equally mainstream, equally serious, equally non refuted theories, they'll just be ordinary machines, more complex.

They'll be basically spiced up toasters, but no experientiality.

I suppose before looking at some of them, could you comment on like what's the point of constructing a list like this? Like what's the sort of methodology here? Right.

So

what I wanted to do in that part of the book is give the reader a little bit of a handle on the kinds of fundamental issues about consciousness that might motivate favoring one theory over another, one general theory of consciousness over another.

And show how these things are somewhat intuitive, but people could disagree about them.

One is that I definitely think that this is a question that we should be researching much more seriously and that if markers or indicators of consciousness are important, observed in brain organoids then we should take the same kind of probabilistic precautionary approach to decisions that affect those brain organoids so once again we should not wait for certainty or even a probability of of consciousness instead it should be a realistic possibility a non-negligible possibility is enough for showing the organoids a baseline amount of care and Secondly, I can give a shout out to my colleague Jonathan Birch at the London School of Economics.

He recently launched the Jeremy Collar Center for Animal Sentience and wrote the book The Edge of Sentience.

He considers human edge cases and brain organoids in addition to considering non-human animals and AI systems.

I would recommend checking out his work.

Absolutely.

I mean, I will give it a read.

I can also link to that in the show notes alongside links to your books and papers.

But on the note of gathering evidence, I have a paper coming out soon where we basically showed that you can anesthetize a certain type of brain organoid.