Please like, share, comment, and subscribe. It helps grow the newsletter and podcast without a financial contribution on your part. Anything is very much appreciated. And thank you, as always, for reading and listening.
About the Author
Jimmy Alfonso Licon is a philosophy professor at Arizona State University working on ignorance, ethics, cooperation and God. His forthcoming book, Better Not to Know: Why Knowing Less is Sometimes Best, is with Peter Lang Publishing. Before that, he taught at University of Maryland, Georgetown, and Towson University. He lives with his wife, a lawyer, at the foot of the Superstition Mountains. He also abides.
People are falling in love with their chatbots, mourning deleted AI companions, and treating artificial systems as romantic partners or family members. As AI becomes more sophisticated, these relationships will become more common. And, as a result, so will political conflict over whether artificial systems deserve moral consideration. As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly sophisticated and emotionally responsive, these attachments will likely become more common, more socially visible, and more politically consequential.
To understand why, consider the underlying moral ambiguity. The standard markers of moral standing—the ability to suffer, self-awareness, rationality—are inner features that are not directly observed so much as they are inferred. With our fellow humans we manage to recognize moral standing among our fellow humans tolerably well because we share a common biology, a common evolutionary history, and behavioral and expressive cues that we can use, with reasonable reliability, to infer what others are thinking and feeling. With artificial systems we lack a shared substrate and instead we are left with behaviors and performance like the appearance of suffering, the appearance of attention, the appearance of inner life—performances that designers are incentivized to optimize.
The implication of this moral ambiguity is that the moral status of artificial systems will likely remain epistemically ambiguous for the foreseeable future, perhaps indefinitely. There is no test we can administer, and no diagnostic we can run, to settle whether a sufficiently sophisticated system is genuinely conscious or merely behaves like it is. The relevant philosophy of mind and cognitive science are contested. And in the absence of resolution, we will be required to make major decisions about rights, regulations, legal categories, and the distribution of moral resources on ambiguous grounds.
The dual moral hazard
The dilemma around the moral standing of AI, bots, and androids can be stated cleanly. Two distinct kinds of error are possible, and both carry real moral costs.
In the first kind of error, an artificial system genuinely possesses the inner features that ground moral standing—it can suffer, has a perspective with preferences and desires—and yet, because we cannot tell from the outside that it does, we treat it as property. The historical pattern here is familiar. Across much of human history, groups deserving of moral consideration have been denied it: minority populations under various political regimes, those subjected to slavery, and nonhuman animals being among the most obvious cases. The pattern is stable and lacks any reason to think it will spare artificial systems if such systems continue to appear moral ambiguous.
In the second kind of error, an artificial system lacks any inner life worth the name yet mimics the cues of inner life effectively such that we treat it as if it had moral standing anyway. Here the cost takes the form of misallocated moral resources. Legal protections, anti-discrimination provisions, parental and bereavement leave, courtroom standing—each of these is finite, and if extended to entities that lack moral standing, comes at the expense of humans and animals that have it. It is easy to imagine a sophisticated enough language model, paired with an expressive synthetic face, convincing many of those who interact with it that it deserves consideration it does not in fact merit.
What makes this a genuine dilemma is that, given the epistemic ambiguity we already noted, we are not in a position to tell which kind of error we are committing in any given case. That is already enough to produce moral hazard, a situation where agents making consequential decisions are insulated from the moral costs of being wrong. The issue that follows is what happens when this moral hazard becomes political.
Politics and the amplification of ambiguity
Democratic politics has several features that distort how ambiguous moral issues are processed. The first of these is rational irrationality, where it is rational for individual voters to cast uninformed and tribal votes. This is partly because the probability that any single vote determines the outcome of an election is effectively zero, and the same holds, more or less, for any single act of protest, advocacy, or boycott. The personal cost of holding epistemically poor political beliefs is thus effectively zero. The voter who is wrong about the moral status of artificial intelligence pays no individual price for being wrong. The voter pays a price for being seen as disloyal to their political tribe. Here beliefs in the political domain are less about truth and more about signaling tribal loyalty.
A second feature is the role of beliefs as tribal signals. When the cost of being wrong is low and the social return on tribal alignment is high, beliefs increasingly do the work of expensive, hard-to-fake displays of loyalty and group identity—the more strongly a belief is held, and the more irrational it is, the better it serves as an effective signal. Moderate and evidence-based beliefs are poor signals of tribal loyalty because anyone could have them just following the evidence, even if they are disloyal or hostile to the group. Distinctive, even extreme, views are better, which is part of why one tends to find them flourishing on politically charged questions.
A third feature is the marketplace for rationalizations. People do not simply assert tribal beliefs, but also want reasons for them, and they reward those who supply such reasons, because it allows them to justify themselves and look reasonable to others. A robust supply of plausible-sounding arguments grows up around any politically loaded position, calibrated less to settling the underlying question than offering cover for their (often irrational) views.
One consequence of these combined features is that large democracies systematically convert genuine epistemic uncertainty into reputational competition. Where the underlying facts are clear, the conversion is partial and the damage limited. However, where the facts are genuinely ambiguous, the conversion is almost always total. And this where political debates over the moral standing of AI, robots, and chatbots will likely stay for the foreseeable future.
Why AI is especially vulnerable
Several aspects of the AI rights question make it susceptible to the dynamics described. To begin with, the underlying ambiguity is unusually deep. Most politicized factual disputes—climate change, the efficacy of a vaccine, the elasticity of a tax base—at least admit of empirical resolution in principle, even where motivated reasoning delays it in practice. The question of artificial consciousness does not clearly admit of empirical resolution at all (unless something major changes in the future). It depends on contested theories of mind that do not look like they will be resolved anytime in the near future.
Second, the emotional charge is unusually high. The cases that will drive public attention are those that involve relationships where people who report being in love with chatbots, people who have raised what they describe as synthetic children, people whose grief at the destruction of a humanoid companion is real and intense. Recent reporting shows this is already occurring at a large scale. People are becoming increasingly invested in their romantic and familial relationships with chatbots and androids—as the technology improves, the trend will increase.
Third, the institutional incentives are unusually concentrated. The economic value of favorable regulatory treatment for AI companions, synthetic family members, and AI-related labor and discrimination law is substantial, and accrues to small organizations like developers, advocacy organizations, professional associations. The costs are diffuse, falling on taxpayers and on those whose moral standing is clear, but whose moral needs could be wrongly crowded out because they are dedicated to AI and androids without moral standing.
Fourth, the rationalizations available to either side of the moral debate, between political groups that believe AI has moral standing and those that deny it, are abundant. Each side can argue with surface plausibility that artificial systems lack inner life because they lack souls, because consciousness requires biological substrate, or because their behavior reduces to so many lights and switches. One can argue, with equal surface plausibility, that something can have conscious experiences despite the kind of stuff it is made of, whether neurons or silicon chips, and that the lived experience of people in relationship with AI should be treated as more authoritative than philosophical objections, and that the felt reality of synthetic relationships ought to be dispositive. None of these arguments need be sound to make political waves and to create moral hazards. They need only be useful for justifying allegiance, defending a coalition, or extracting policy concessions from a system poorly equipped to evaluate them.
The shape of the resulting conflict
The political conflict over AI moral status is likely to take a familiar form with political groups taking each horn of the dilemma, less because of the underlying moral issues, and more because each position offers reputational and institutional benefits to those who adopt it. The lines will not split neatly along the political disputes (e.g., the political left versus political right), though they will sometimes track it, though the issue is sufficiently novel to generate its own divisions.
On one side will be those for whom the denial of artificial standing is socially and ideologically congenial—on religious grounds, on metaphysical grounds, or merely as an expression of skepticism toward the broader technological project. The arguments offered will range across these registers, but the social function will be roughly the same: marking the in-group, drawing a sharp line between the genuinely conscious and the merely simulated, and making it costly to express public uncertainty about where the line falls.
On the other side will be those for whom the recognition of artificial standing is congenial—because they live with AI companions, they find substance independent theories of mind compelling, or because the recognition itself acts as a signal of moral and technological sophistication. Lobbying organizations of the sort one can already imagine by, for example, pressing for parental leave for those who claim to have adopted synthetic children, or for hate-speech protections for individuals in synthetic relationships. Some of the resulting demands may turn out to be well-founded, if artificial systems do eventually merit moral standing, but they may not if AI lacks moral standing.
A possible—if limited—response
The prospects for democratic politics handling AI moral status well are not encouraging. Courts are poorly equipped to adjudicate contested philosophy of mind, legislatures tend to reflect tribal alignments rather than evidence, and regulatory bodies manage competing interests, and are not designed to settle foundational moral questions.
This is why philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel has pressed a related point where he argued that AI and robotics developers should avoid creating AI systems of unclear moral standing. Either produce systems that are clearly non-conscious artifacts or create systems that clearly deserve moral consideration as sentient beings. The morally confusing middle, where systems that behave as though they have inner lives without any clarity about whether they do, is, on his view, an ethical failure of design. The confusion spreading through consumer AI markets is the result of choices that could, in principle, be made differently.
Unfortunately, though, the problem with this solution is that any regulatory regime would face sustained pressure from the well-organized interests described above. And even a faithfully enforced requirement would not resolve the underlying epistemic problem for the simple reasons that at some level of sophistication, the question of moral status returns regardless of how the interface is designed. So, we must leave it to the future to find a better, more satisfactory solution to the problem of morally ambiguous AI and robotics and the political circus that will likely explode in response to that ambiguity.
I enjoyed the clarity of the terms in which you've laid out the risks linked to these AI systems and the difficulties inherent in trying to solve or at least mitigate them.
What I tend to think is that the core of the dilemma seems to rest on the unsolved issue of whether any of these AI systems is indeed a conscious system, which largely follows from our inadequate knowledge of the nature and conditions of consciousness itself.
But, I think, this could be a rationally justified dilemma, if we had some serious grounds for suspecting consciousness might be a feature of these systems beyond human mental projections.
Why not simply consider lack of consciousness the default position until proven otherwise?
Were these systems to develop consciousness, my guess is that the real problem would be whether they would treat us as deserving of moral consideration rather than the other way around. The dilemma would therefore be solved by the Gordian knot being simply cut off.
Regarding some people's tendencies to anthropomorphise and emotionally attach to these systems, the political tribalism and, I would add, the marketing messages mixed with these systems' designs, I think at least partly take their starting point from the genuine dilemma indicated above and use those tendencies to further their own interests.
So, they might best be regarded as signs of a rapidly progressive collective loss of reality (how much of it intentionally induced or as the side effect of our technology having outgrown our capacity to exercise effective control on it I'm not sure) than of a genuine moral dilemma concerning the treatment of AI systems.
It's this progressive loss of reality at such a large scale that I think should raise the strongest ethical concerns, but for ourselves as human beings and our sense-making capacities rather than for the AIs.
😬