Anders Sandberg at TEDx Oxford on the ethics of making AIs that can suffer. Systems biology promises to replace many animal experiments with computer simulations. They are becoming larger, more accurate and simulate more and more of the animals. The logical endpoint would be an emulation: a perfect copy of the animal in the computer, the ideal lab animal. But should we treat virtual animals any different from real animals? If an experiment is too painful to do on a biological animal, maybe it is too painful to do on a software emulation too? Or is it just numbers in a computer? We cannot know, and this suggests that we should rather be safe than sorry. We need virtual lab animal ethics, and be careful in not unnecessarily harming software that may actually be conscious.




Anders Sandberg at TEDx Oxford on the ethics of making AIs that can suffer. Systems biology promises to replace many animal experiments with computer simulations. They are becoming larger, more accurate and simulate more and more of the animals. The logical endpoint would be an emulation: a perfect copy of the animal in the computer, the ideal lab animal. But should we treat virtual animals any different from real animals? If an experiment is too painful to do on a biological animal, maybe it is too painful to do on a software emulation too? Or is it just numbers in a computer? We cannot know, and this suggests that we should rather be safe than sorry. We need virtual lab animal ethics, and be careful in not unnecessarily harming software that may actually be conscious.




https://youtu.be/QqKOKHXLEFk