Presenter
Jeff Sebo
Jeff Sebo is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, Affiliated Professor of Bioethics, Medical Ethics, Philosophy, and Law, Director of the Animal Studies M.A. Program, Director of the Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program, Co-Director of the Wild Animal Welfare Program, and Deputy Director of the Center for Environmental and Animal Protection at New York University. His research focuses on animal minds, ethics, and law; AI minds, ethics, and law; global health and climate ethics and law; and effective altruism and global priorities research. He is the author of Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves (2022) and co-author of Chimpanzee Rights (2018) and Food, Animals, and the Environment (2018). He is also a board member at Minding Animals International, an advisory board member at the Insect Welfare Research Society, a senior research fellow at the Legal Priorities Project, and a mentor at Sentient Media.
Summary:
Investigating Digital Minds
How can we tell whether an AI system has consciousness, sentience, agency, or other morally significant capacities? And how should we treat AI systems that might have these capacities? In this talk, we will discuss a “marker method” that we can use to test AI systems for moral patienthood. We will also discuss how we can make decisions about AI development, deployment, and scaling under uncertainty about whether AI systems matter, how much they matter, or in what ways they matter. As we will see, there are substantial risks involved with false negatives (mistakenly treating subjects as objects) and false positives (mistakenly treating objects as subjects). Fortunately, we can mitigate these risks by developing rigorous evaluations and by seeking co-beneficial policies for humans, animals, and AI systems.
