Artificial reinforcement learning (RL) is a widely used technique in artificial intelligence that provides a general method for training agents to perform a wide variety of behaviours. RL as used in computer science has striking parallels to reward and punishment learning in animal and human brains. I argue that present-day artificial RL agents have a very small but nonzero degree of ethical importance. This is particularly plausible for views according to which sentience comes in degrees based on the abilities and complexities of minds, but even binary views on consciousness should assign nonzero probability to RL programs having morally relevant experiences. While RL programs are not a top ethical priority today, they may become more significant in the coming decades as RL is increasingly applied to industry, robotics, video games, and other areas. I encourage scientists, philosophers, and citizens to begin a conversation about our ethical duties to reduce the harm that we inflict on powerless, voiceless RL agents.
Category: Speculative Sentience
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Ethical Issues in Artificial Reinforcement Learning
There is a remarkable connection between artificial reinforcement-learning (RL) algorithms and the process of reward learning in animal brains. Do RL algorithms on computers pose moral problems? I think current RL computations do matter, though they’re probably less morally significant than animals, including insects, because the degree of consciousness and emotional experience seems limited in present-day RL agents. As RL becomes more sophisticated and is hooked up to other more “conscious” brain-like operations, this topic will become increasingly urgent. Given the vast numbers of RL computations that will be run in the future in industry, video games, robotics, and research, the moral stakes may be high. I encourage scientists and altruists to work toward more humane approaches to reinforcement learning.
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Why digital sentience is relevant to animal activists
Robots are hard to build, but they can go places like Mars where it would be more expensive and more risky to send humans. Computers need power, but this is easier to generate in electrical form than by creating a supply of human-digestible foods that contain a variety of nutrients. Machines are easier to shield from radiation, don’t need exercise to prevent muscle atrophy, and can generally be made more hardy than biological astronauts.
But in the long run, it won’t be just in space where machines will have the advantage. Biological neurons transmit signals at 1 to 120 meters per second, whereas electronic signals travel at 300 million meters per second (the speed of light). Neurons can fire at most 200 times per second, compared with about 2 billion times per second for modern microprocessors. While human brains currently have more total processing power than even the fastest supercomputers, machines are predicted to catch up in processing power within a few decades.
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Sentience in machines and anti-substratism: Can machines feel?
First version: Dec. 2016. Updated: Jan. 2017 I have created this text from the materials I prepared for the talk I gave at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Santiago de Compostela on December 15, 2016 along with Brian Tomasik, which was entitled “Outlook and future Risks of artificial consciousness”.
“Digital computers have eclipsed analog, but perhaps the extraordinary advantages of analog computers, as his “infinite” precision or its ability to efficiently solve problems such as ordination could be a requirement for sentience, because machines for which we have overwhelming proof of sentience (animals in general) are analog machines.”
Source: http://manuherran.com/wp-content/uploads/Sentience-in-machines.pdf
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Living robots created as scientists turn frog cells into entirely new life-forms
Xenobots. Could self-replicating blissbots create a happiness explosion?
Seen in The hedonistic Imperative
“The world’s first living robots have been built using stem cells from frog embryos, in a strange machine-animal hybrid that scientists say is an ‘entirely new life-form.’”
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Researchers are keeping pig brains alive outside the body
There was no evidence that the disembodied pig brains regained consciousness. However, in what Sestan termed a “mind-boggling” and “unexpected” result, billions of individual cells in the brains were found to be healthy and capable of normal activity.
“These brains may be damaged, but if the cells are alive, it’s a living organ,” says Steve Hyman, director of psychiatric research at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who was among those briefed on the work. “It’s at the extreme of technical know-how, but not that different from preserving a kidney.”
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Mini brains: Artificially Created Tiny Brain “Organoids” Show Signs of Neural Activity
The “mini brains” were technically “cerebral organoids,” made from the cells that make up the region of the brain known as the cerebellum. They started out as clusters of stem cells raised in a special medium designed to support brain development, eventually growing into organoids with a similar structure as a real-life cerebellum.
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What is paneudaimonia?
This paneudaimonia looks like the opposite of panpsychism.
“Paneudaimonia is the idea that the whole universe is absolute pleasure, except in the domain of what we know as sentient beings, in which all experiences imply different types of suffering.
Paneudaimonia is the idea that identity, and / or the “I” and / or consciousness are generated and / or are linked to suffering or pain. That is to say, that the self-consciousness is always painful. But the non-conscious experience (the not self-consciousness) is always pleasurable.
According to the idea “Paneudaimonia”, every time we experience something positive or pleasant, it is because we are losing self or identity; and when we experience the self or the identity, we experience it in a painful way.”
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Organoids, chimeras and ex vivo tissues
“Organoid” is the term generally used to refer to a small ball of human cells grown in cell culture from stem cells (human stem cells for human organoids). The stem cells may be embryonic stem cells, induced pluripotent stem cells, or other types of stem cells, but the effort has been to get cells that will all become one or more cell types found in an organ. Thus, there are human liver organoids, kidney organoids, gut organoids…and yes, brain organoids. The human neural organoids have been grown for over three years – and some of them have survived for over two years. They have diameters of about 4 millimeters (or a sixth of an inch), about the size of a very small pea. They have no vasculature and so the cells need to be in contact with the oxygen and nutrient bearing (and waste bearing-away) culture media. Currently human neural organoids have about two to six million neurons (no other brain cells so far, just neurons). They self-organize, grow synapses, fire, and continue to get more and more complex as time goes on. Still, by comparison, the human brain is estimated to contain approximately 86 billion neurons.
Chimeras – in this case, human/non-human brain chimeras – are creatures with some human brain cells and some non-human brain cells. (Thus far, in brains at least, they are always non-human animals with some human cells, not humans with some non-human cells.) Chimeras have been used in research for many years, though organoids are opening new possibilities: such as transplanting human organoids into rodent brains – which turn out to grow blood vessels for them.
Researchers have also long used human brain tissue kept alive outside the body – ex vivo tissue – but what is used and how is, like chimeras, becoming “new and improved.” Instead of keeping flat sheets of human brain cells alive in a dish, researchers are keeping alive and studying larger and larger chunks of human brains, taken from neurosurgical discards or from the recently dead. There are even some efforts, so far only in non-humans, to keep whole brains from dead animals “alive” apart from their bodies.
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A biomaterial that arrange itself
“Using DASH, the Cornell engineers created a biomaterial that can autonomously emerge from its nanoscale building blocks and arrange itself – first into polymers and eventually mesoscale shapes. Starting from a 55-nucleotide base seed sequence, the DNA molecules were multiplied hundreds of thousands times, creating chains of repeating DNA a few millimeters in size. The reaction solution was then injected in a microfluidic device that provided a liquid flow of energy and the necessary building blocks for biosynthesis.”