“The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI.” by Jonathan Birch
Can octopuses feel pain and pleasure?
What about crabs, shrimps, insects, or spiders?
How do we tell whether a person unresponsive after severe brain injury might be suffering?
When does a fetus in the womb start to have conscious experiences?
Could there even be rudimentary feelings in miniature models of the human brain, grown from human stem cells?
And what about AI?
These are questions about the edge of sentience, and they are subject to enormous, disorienting uncertainty. The stakes are immense, and neglecting the risks can have terrible costs. We need to err on the side of caution, yet it’s often far from clear what ‘erring on the side of caution’ should mean in practice. When are we going too far? When are we not doing enough?
The Edge of Sentience presents a comprehensive precautionary framework designed to help us reach ethically sound, evidence-based decisions despite our uncertainty.
The book is packed with specific, detailed proposals intended to generate discussion and debate. At no point, however, does it offer any magic tricks to make our uncertainty go away. Uncertainty is with us for the long term. We must manage our uncertainty by taking precautions that are proportionate to the risks. It’s time to start debating what those steps should be.
The free online version is available now.
Please go to https://academic.oup.com/book/57949 and click on PDF to get a PDF of the whole book. (Individual chapters are also available as PDFs – just click on whichever chapters you want.)
The online book is completely free to everyone.
Virtually the only promotion is word of mouth (no publisher is going to invest much in marketing a free book!) so Jonathan Birch is grateful for all shares and forwards.
The print book will be released on 15 August, so please consider pre-ordering it. If you pre-order directly from the OUP website, you can get 30% off by using the discount code AAFLYG6. The price with the code is just £21/$28.
You see, I know that it’s difficult to think well about ‘certainty’, ‘probability’, ‘perception’, etc.
But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life & other peoples lives.
And the trouble is that thinking about these things is not thrilling, but often downright nasty.
And when it’s nasty then it’s most important– Ludwig Wittgenstein,
letter to Norman Malcolm,
16 November 1944
The need for action and decision focuses minds,
puts limits on speculation,
and forces us to make judgements—
judgements about what counts as evidence of sentience and how that evidence should guide us.
But the urgency of the problems does not imply a need to rush.
Good decisions come not from rushing,
nor from procrastinating,
but from taking the right amount of time.
When faced with the disturbing and often terrible problems at the edge of sentience,
we need to be prepared to act fast—but we also need to make time to reflect,
deliberate,
and listen to views from across the full range of reasonable disagreement.
And we must do this while ensuring that the sentience candidates themselves remain at the centre of the picture.
(A) Geological time scale shown as millions of years ago (mya). Solid lines indicate estimated occurrence of lineages sampled for this study; dashed lines indicate estimated age of representative taxa.
(B) Schematics showing proportions of anti-DC0-immunoreactive centers (shades of magenta) in the right lateral protocerebrum of species described in this account. Rostral is up, distal to the right. Nested optic lobe neuropils shown blue; rostrally disposed globuli cell clusters, green; generalized neuropil domains of the lateral protocerebrum, mid-gray.
Surtil : 