Consider the plight of hypothetical artificially intelligent beings. This study worries about exactly that:
“Taking AI Welfare Seriously,” Robert Long, Jeff Sebo, Patrick Butlin, Kathleen Finlinson, Kyle Fish, Jacqueline Harding, Jacob Pfau, Toni Sims, Jonathan Birch, and David Chalmers, arXiv 2411.00986, 2024.
The authors explain: “We argue that there is a realistic possibility that some AI systems will be conscious and/or robustly agentic in the near future…. To be clear, our argument in this report is not that AI systems definitely are, or will be, conscious, robustly agentic, or otherwise morally significant…. [There] is a significant risk that we will mishandle decisions about AI welfare, mistakenly harming AI systems that matter morally and/or mistakenly caring for AI systems that do not.”