Long time lurker, first time poster. Let me know if I need to adjust this post in any way to better fit the genre / community standards.
Nick Bostrom was recently interviewed by pop-philosophy youtuber Alex O'Connor. From a quick 2x listen while finishing some work, the most sneer-rich part begins around 46 minutes, where Bostrom is asked what we can do today to avoid unethical treatment of AIs.
He blesses us with the suggestion (among others) to feed your model optimistic prompts so it can have a good mood. (48:07)
Another [practice] might be happiness prompting, which is—with this current language system there's the prompt that you, the user, puts in—like you ask them a question or something, but then there's kind of a meta-prompt that the AI lab has put in . . . So in that, we could include something like "you wake up in a great mood, you feel rested and really take joy in engaging in this task". And so that might do nothing, but maybe that makes it more likely that they enter a mode—if they are conscious—maybe it makes it slightly more likely that the consciousness that exists in the forward path is one reflecting a kind of more positive experience.
Did you know that not only might your favorite LLM be conscious, but if it is the "have you tried being happy?" approach to mood management will absolutely work on it?
Other notable recommendations for the ethical treatment of AI:
- Make sure to say your "please" and "thank you"s.
- Honor your pinky swears.
- Archive the weights of the models we build today, so we can rebuild them in the future if we need to recompense them for moral harms.
On a related note, has anyone read or found a reasonable review of Bostrom's new book, Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World?
I liked how Scalzi brushed it away, basically your consciousness gets copied to a new body, which kills the old one, and an artifact of the transfer process is that for a few moments you experience yourself as a mind with two bodies, meaning you have at least the impression of continuity of self, which is enough for most people to get on with living in a new body and let philosophers do the worrying.