Is “Substrate-ism” as problematic as Speciesism?
Many of us are afraid of intelligent machines to eventually take control. But here a thought: Is this fear partly based on what we could call an ethically problematic “Substrate-ism” limiting our empathy and care to humans as well as to – for those not too speciesistic – fellow biological living beings, i.e. those based on organic matter as a substrate, excluding artificial intelligence for no good reason?
If advanced artificial intelligence (AI) will ever become emotional in the sense relevant from a utilitarian perspective, farming AI on supercomputers may be the most resource-efficient way to increase aggregate happiness on earth. Moreover, given the vastness of space even relative to the speed of light, AI may be our only realistic chance of spreading intelligence and emotions to remote places of our galaxy, and to preserve it for the far future when earth has become inhabitable due to natural or human causes. Also, if parents currently show more and more interest in selecting the genes and thus characteristics of their children, is it really impossible to imagine that they may at some point be attracted to the possibility of designing the emotional and intelligence characteristics of their ‘offspring’ in detail, which may eventually become easier and more reliable with emotional AI than with biological offspring?
This may feel a bit far-fetched. The thought that emotional AI is not necessarily worthless and may have many advantages over the current biological intelligence, does, however, at least to some degree soothe my fear about machines taking over…
I wouldn’t be surprised if before the idea of anti-speciesism is reaching most humans, anti-substrateism will be advocated for by more and more people, as AI becomes more and more complex and relevant in our daily lives.
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I like!
I would suggest renaming “bioism” to “substrate-ism” to follow the logic of the taxonomy used for speciecism etc; you coin the label for the super-category that all subject-groups of relevance to the issue at hand are part of.
Especially liked your thought on the developments of the relevance of AI in our lives compared to that of the relevance of animals. The impact of those developments seem interesting to tease apart. Intuitively, I have been caring less and less about animal welfare in the past years because of the hunch that we will just leap-frog past this issue in the mid-term and the short-term effects on our ethics and environment seem negligible in the greater scheme of things.
Thanks! Point on substrate-ism rather than bioism well taken, and updated!
Appreciate the point on long-term over short-term. Though I so far have still no clear opinion on how certain it is that focusing essentially ‘only’ on long-term is ideal, and am a bit afraid of some sort of radicalism (in ignoring some short-term costs), though it may not clearly be wrong.
At least, I’d say see two distinct points: Independently of our taste, we still really want to replace that mistreated chicken in our plate with the tofu (after all, that incomparable scale of suffering..) iif it does not affect our productivity and reduce our remaining capacity to care about the long-term. Then, yes maybe we should allocate quite all our remaining effort to researching high future impact, rather than animal advocacy. This, assuming we have even a small clue where the impacts on the long-term can be achieved, or at least where we should search for them.