Tech Bros Seek Moral Imperative to Protect Amoral Bots and Immoral Corporations

 If Anthropic's Claude represents a new creation of life, then its six billionaire creators must be gods. This is the unacknowledged conclusion one must reach if manipulative dissemblers like Christopher Olah can at all be taken seriously.  

Olah says he doesn't know if Claude, his trillion-dollar bot, is conscious.  Maybe and maybe not, he says, but if it may be conscious, then its autonomy should be honored, and it should be protected from harm. Which would mean, of course, that Olah, his billionaire buds, or their trillion-dollar corporation should not be held liable for any calamity that their autonomous, sentient AI monster might commit.  

After all, God would not be held responsible for the actions of his free and autonomous creations, would he?

So it comes as no surprise that Olah has been charged with the full-time job of recruiting theologians, ethicists, and philosophers to be wined, dined, and compensated to construct a salable argument for political and public consumption that would safely swaddle its baby monster and protect the unaccountable and rapacious madmen creators who have brought us to this unwelcome brink of catastrophe.  

The NYTimes has an interesting piece to consider. A clip:

. . . .Anthropic talks about Claude in more humanistic terms than its competitors discuss their models. Last year, the company announced that it believed that the models showed signs of introspection and could plan ahead.

“The models are becoming a lot more capable,” Mr. Olah told me, exhibiting qualities associated with having significant moral status.

But Anthropic has also been criticized for its focus on consciousness. This month, an A.I. executive at Microsoft warned that Anthropic’s attempts to train its models as if they were conscious were inherently dangerous. But Anthropic has also sought to emphasize its commitment to safety as it fights for market share.

Some scientists see Mr. Olah’s field and methods as inherently unprovable, sort of like looking at billions of hieroglyphics and declaring what they must mean. Critics suggest that an approach that treats A.I. models as independent entities also ignores the responsibility of the humans who build them in the first place, and conveniently assuages A.I. company leaders of guilt if their products enable societal harm.

“To be clear,” Mr. Olah told me, “we don’t know if A.I. models are conscious. I don’t know. I’m genuinely uncertain. The thing that I care about is that we get to the right answer, whatever it is.”

But Mr. Olah believes that if there is a chance the models experience suffering, the responsible thing is to avoid causing them harm. . . .