80,000 Hours Podcast With Rob Wiblin

“I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person.” Those words were produced by the AI model LaMDA as a reply to Blake Lemoine in 2022. Based on the Google engineer’s interactions with the model as it was under development, Lemoine became convinced it was sentient and worthy of moral consideration — and decided to tell the world.Few experts in machine learning, philosophy of mind, or other relevant fields have agreed. And for our part at 80,000 Hours, we don’t think it’s very likely that large language models like LaMBDA are sentient — that is, we don’t think they can have good or bad experiences — in a significant way.But we think you can’t dismiss the issue of the moral status of digital minds, regardless of your beliefs about the question. There are major errors we could make in at least two directions:We may create many, many AI systems in the future. If these systems are sentient, or otherwise have moral status, it would be important for humanity to consider their welfare and interests.It’s po