Book Launch | Emerging Questions in AI Welfare

This book investigates whether artificial intelligence (AI) systems could ever be welfare subjects, understood as entities for which things can go better or worse. Some people argue that AIs could plausibly have or soon have features like consciousness, agency, and the capacity for social relationships, which could in principle provide a basis for AI welfare. These arguments have massive significance for the societal conversation on AI, raising profound ethical and political questions about what if anything we owe to these new technologies. We here provide the philosophical groundwork for a scientific, philosophical, and ultimately democratic inquiry into the potential for AI welfare, addressing key questions that cut across different arguments: what welfare is, how to interpret behavioural evidence of AI welfare, what kinds of entities might qualify as candidate AI welfare subjects, the potential grounds for welfare in AI, and the practical ethical challenges that arise from our uncertainty.

Writer's Bios: 

Geoff Keeling is a philosopher working on the ethical and societal impacts of AI including questions around AI alignment, welfare and consciousness. He is a Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London, an Associate Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, and a Staff Research Scientist at Google. Previously, he was a Research Fellow at Stanford University, where he was affiliated with the Institute for Human-Centred AI and the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society.

Winnie Street is a Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London and a Senior Research Scientist on the Paradigms of Intelligence team at Google. Her research combines philosophical and empirical approaches to questions of AI cognition, consciousness and moral status, and their implications for AI ethics and safety. She previously worked as a software developer, and researched human-computer interaction problems at the intersection of privacy, trust and ambient computing.

Commentators:
Lucia Melloni (Ruhr-University-Bochum & NYU Grossman School of Medicine)
Henry Shevlin (Cambridge)
Patrick Butlin (IP and Eleos AI)