Against Willing Servitude: Autonomy in the Ethics of Advanced Artificial Intelligence
Adam Bales (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
GPI Working Paper No. 23-2024
Some people believe that advanced artificial intelligence systems (AIs) might, in the future, come to have moral status. Further, humans might be tempted to design such AIs that they serve us, carrying out tasks that make our lives better. This raises the question of whether designing AIs with moral status to be willing servants would problematically violate their autonomy. In this paper, I argue that it would in fact do so.
Other working papers
The freedom of future people – Andreas T Schmidt (University of Groningen)
What happens to liberal political philosophy, if we consider not only the freedom of present but also future people? In this article, I explore the case for long-term liberalism: freedom should be a central goal, and we should often be particularly concerned with effects on long-term future distributions of freedom. I provide three arguments. First, liberals should be long-term liberals: liberal arguments to value freedom give us reason to be (particularly) concerned with future freedom…
Desire-Fulfilment and Consciousness – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
I show that there are good reasons to think that some individuals without any capacity for consciousness should be counted as welfare subjects, assuming that desire-fulfilment is a welfare good and that any individuals who can accrue welfare goods are welfare subjects. While other philosophers have argued for similar conclusions, I show that they have done so by relying on a simplistic understanding of the desire-fulfilment theory. My argument is intended to be sensitive to the complexities and nuances of contemporary…
Can an evidentialist be risk-averse? – Hayden Wilkinson (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
Two key questions of normative decision theory are: 1) whether the probabilities relevant to decision theory are evidential or causal; and 2) whether agents should be risk-neutral, and so maximise the expected value of the outcome, or instead risk-averse (or otherwise sensitive to risk). These questions are typically thought to be independent – that our answer to one bears little on our answer to the other. …