Surely you recognize the plethora of ethical concerns behind this? Certainly there is much to be learned in terms of energy efficiency of computation but I'm undecided as to whether we should go down this path. If we do, I believe it should be regulated from the get-go or else it will be too late by the time the biological substrates reach animal-analogous intelligence. Perhaps if done for classical computing research without trialing machine learning we can avoid asking ourselves at what point the biological machine has sentience and deserves agency?

I'm sorry, but I fail to see the ethical dilemma of creating an artificial biological computer.

I think it's more likely that it would be ethical than unethical. Sentience is "about" the functions necessary for animal life. These functions are a huge waste from a computational perspective. A good bio-computer would be comparable to a fungus, or head cheese[].

[] http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=687

I see your point and agree that it would be extraneous to model awareness for a biomachine whose purpose is efficiency. But what of the inevitable research that will expressly attempt to create AGI using said unaware computation paste?

Yeah, that's a concern to a degree. But I'll justify why I'm not really worried about it in two ways.

1) The computations we want to do may still be expressed better without consciousness. Think Chinese Room thought experiment, or philosophical zombies. In other words, we may be able to make something that can understand and execute complex commands, perceive and react to its environment, and communicate information — without having feelings, desires, or consciousness per se.

2) I'm less worried about creating new things to be unethical to than I am about the dis-ethical treatment of currently sentient beings.

> In other words, we may be able to make something that can understand and execute complex commands, perceive and react to its environment, and communicate information — without having feelings, desires, or consciousness per se.

> 2) I'm less worried about creating new things to be unethical to than I am about the dis-ethical treatment of currently sentient beings.

Both of these relate to one of my major concerns:

We don’t yet have a testable definition of “feelings, desires, or consciousness” [0] such that we could even tell if an AI did or did not have this characteristic.

[0] and any of the other various words frequently thrown around as attempts to create such a definition. Every time I make this claim I get responses along the lines of “yes we do: $foo!”, but in my experience so far, all of these turn out to be one of (1) circular definitions, or (2) things humans don’t have, or (3) things which plants and the enemy characters in Wolfenstein 3D do have.

I'd define consciousness as something like "subjective experience". You have consciousness if you can experience the experiencing of things.

I don't think that's a circular definition. I think humans have it. I don't think plants or video game characters have it.

However: it is not testable, and it's not obvious that it could be. If someone claims to have subjective experiences, I don't think there's any way to know whether they're conscious or whether they're just an automata acting conscious.

If consciousness is just being able to experience experiences, then that's a function that doesn't have any outputs, how could you possibly test for it?

And this applies equally to humans, c.f. solipsism. It could also apply to all matter in the universe, it's just that most of that matter has no computational capability, and no way to express itself even if it did.

> I'd define consciousness as something like "subjective experience". You have consciousness if you can experience the experiencing of things

> However: it is not testable, and it's not obvious that it could be.

If it isn’t testable, do you really have a definition rather than a tautology? What does it mean to have “subjective experience”? One instance of a game AI is subject to different inputs than another instance of the same AI, which you reject (as would I: I listed it as an example of how bad the definitions have been and definitely not as a claim they’re sentient).

It is perfectly consistent for something to be well-defined and also untestable.

For example, you could ask me any question about the contents of my mind. Let's say you ask me if my favourite colour is green, and I say it is. You don't know whether my favourite colour really is green or if I'm lying. The fact that you have no way to ascertain my true favourite colour doesn't mean favourite colours are ill-defined! You just can't know what anyone else's favourite colour is.

(Not that I'm claiming my "subjective experience" definition is well-defined -- I accept that it's pretty vague as definitions go).

> (1) circular definitions, or (2) things humans don’t have, or (3) things which plants and the enemy characters in Wolfenstein 3D do have.

I'd be curious to read more about these 3 arguments and their flaws.

Perhaps this sort of research would further our understanding of what sentience really is

> I believe it should be regulated from the get-go or else it will be too late by the time the biological substrates reach animal-analogous intelligence.

I assume you are also a vegan? I would put my energy into fighting animal meat and animal husbandry today than worrying about a level of technology we probably won't reach for at least a few decades if not a few centuries.

My words here are not exclusively stemming from my thoughts on animal suffering, but also from wishing we could have preempted the current wave of ML-powered surveillance had we known where it would now be two decades ago and enacted sufficient regulations.

So perhaps we should regulate, rather than hope we never do something that could progress our understanding

My reticence comes from not being fully confident in our ability to regulate technologies with an essentially luddite governmental body when it comes to tech they do not wish to fully understand. Perhaps if we change how they learn about new developments we can expect them to make informed decisions regarding something like organic AI.

Perhaps we should have better educated regulators then.

Perhaps with the proper source code, sentience can already be created with existing hardware? I don't think regulation of hardware is a solution to what is fundamentally a software problem.

We already have ethical models for how we treat animals. It seems logical to apply the same models to artificial intelligences if they are able to suffer the same way animals are.

Do you believe that using a biological computer for research is ethically any different than an animal analogous intelligence in silicon?

I think we will have to navigate similar ethical straits in the development of both organic and inorganic sentience.