Do No Harm Policy for Minds in Other Substrates
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.55613/jeet.v29i2.73Abstract
Various authors have argued that in the future not only will it be technically feasible for human minds to be transferred to other substrates, but this will become, for most humans, the preferred option over the current biological limitations. It has even been claimed that such a scenario is inevitable in order to solve the challenging, but imperative, multi-agent value alignment problem. In all these considerations, it has been overlooked that, in order to create a suitable environment for a particular mind – for example, a personal universe in a computational substrate – numerous other potentially sentient beings will have to be created. These range from non-player characters to subroutines. This article analyzes the additional suffering and mind crimes that these scenarios might entail. We offer a partial solution to reduce the suffering by imposing on the transferred mind the perception of indicators to measure potential suffering in non-player characters. This approach can be seen as implementing literal empathy through enhanced cognition.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2021 Soenke Ziesche, Roman V. Yampolskiy
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC-BY 4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) after publication, while providing bibliographic details that credit JEET (See The Effect of Open Access).