The Future of Life Institute Endorses Avoiding the Creation of Digital Minds

In §4 "Human Agency and Liberty" of FLI's Pro-Human AI Declaration, the principle "No AI Personhood" states: "AI systems must not be granted legal personhood, and AI systems should not be designed such that they deserve personhood." (emphasis added)

The second part suggests that we should actively avoid designing sentient AIs. After all, if they were sentient, then they would deserve personhood. To preclude the latter, bar the former.

The likely reason: liability evasion. A companion principle reads: "AI must not be able to act as a liability shield, preventing those deploying it from being legally responsible for their actions." Personhood is an upstream fix: no personhood means there is no entity, other than existing companies, to absorb responsibility. 

The contending reason: avoiding power concentration. The broader framing ("Human Agency and Liberty") suggests that AI legal status could concentrate power and dilute human rights protections.

I can't be sure these are FLI's reasons. The conference was closed; deliberations are not public. But all this to say, if these are FLI's reasons, then both reasons are premature. 

Both concerns can be addressed by placing AIs within legal structures that make them accountable under existing liability and antitrust frameworks, like A-corps. Using personhood is, at best, a sledgehammer for a nail. At its worst, it's a red herring, and companies are trying to deflect the focus of their responsibility onto prejudices about codifying AI sentience.

A better reason for banning the creation of artificial sentience would be analogous to restricting DNA research, human cloning, or genome editing. In all cases, the process entails parties who cannot represent themselves, competitive pressure if one party takes unilateral action, and irreversibility in cases of large-scale deployment. That said, I think that decision should come from international conversations with international values, and not a bunch of Westerners in New Orleans. 

I may be harping; the declaration is not binding. But, I do think it's a bad look. I get that timelines are short, and we're trying to set up the long-term conditions for global flourishing. But if global flourishing is the real goal, then the globe should be involved. That means, minimally, a bit of diversity in the room where it happens. Ideally, it's a transparent process for public accountability. 

Let's not forget: we may have no choice in the matter. For all we know, sentience can be an emergent property of current or future architectures. That's not to say §4 is wasted ink, just that it could use a little humility.

Fair points — I should have been more careful with the "free access" framing. Here's a quick revision:

Yes, UBI is rationed per-person. These commons should be too. In both UBI and the commons, we abolish evaluative rationing — rationing based on perceived deservingness.

I'll split the "projects you would not approve of" concern in two parts. The first is a harm worry (dangerous use); the second is a dilution worry (most compute goes to non-safety projects). 

Amount-rationing could address harm by not giving enough compute to do harm, but it would not address dilution concerns, which may be as much, if not more, of a problem for funders.

Which is why, upon further reflection, I'd like to introduce a second gate: a gate by type. Shevlane (2022) and Bucknall & Trager (GovAI, 2023) have argued basically this — that selective access can preserve safety-positive work while limiting misuse. 

So yes, I think my model needs some gates. But I would still push hard to keep the gates non-evaluative. That's how, I think, to inspire safety research that would never have been done, by people who'd never have applied for a grant. And that's what the commons is for.

There is already some commons work being done. It didn't feel appropriate to include these examples in this specific post since it focuses on UBI parallels. I wanted to shout some out here anyways to: acknowledge that people have spoken about a similar framing before; draw attention to these live experiments; and spawn grounded reflection on this post's merits.

CAIS Compute Cluster exists and is doing a partial version of what I'm proposing. The Center for AI Safety is basically already running a small-scale compute commons, and reports supporting ~350 researchers and ~109 papers through its compute cluster. This follows the Shared compute fund project idea that's been floating around.

Foresight Institute's AI for Science & Safety Nodes are opening in SF and Berlin offering "grant funding, office and community spaces, and local compute"... basically a commons that bridges physical space, services, and digital resources.

A few other works inspired this post, and I am grateful to all of them:

• The real-bottelneck-is-talent is a variation on MATS Research that shows that the field is mentor-constrained, and echoes late 2010s 80K discourse.
• Manifund framed grants as a "command economy" first in this post.
• Talk about automating research came from a few sources, Hobbhahn's being one.
• Forethought's recent post on moral public goods was a good primer overall. 

Perfect! Yeah, Rethink Charity does 90% of what I was originally thinking here. Thanks for the pointer Ian!

Couldn't comment on the doc, so here are a few others I found:

• The FTX Future Fund curated this list of projects they seem inclined to fund.
• SHIP's Projects Categories Page offers ideas that students may be able to tackle. Last updated in 2019 before the group discontinued, but many ideas have yet to be undertaken.
• Capacity Ventures (I'm not sure about their background and couldn't find their website) put out this list with the added benefit of being prioritized by the expected benefit to the undertaker.
• This CV Project Ideas list (unknown source) lists many of the above resources, some additional ones, and some new ones. Worth reading as a complementary post to this one.