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

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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.

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