Interview, Fireside Chat
Highlights: Edge cases of sentience & acting ethically despite massive uncertainty | Jonathan Birch
- The field of consciousness science may have achieved less than anticipated by 2024, prompting clinicians to increasingly prioritize caution when treating patients with disorders of consciousness.
- Future evidence regarding fetal sentience could advance the estimated timeline for plausible sentience to earlier developmental stages, potentially eroding arguments linking abortion rights to non-sentience or current viability thresholds as medical technology extends viability.
- Rapid advancements in neural organoids create a risk of unforeseen developments, with researchers predicting organoid neuron counts may soon reach approximately ten times that of a bee brain.
- Researchers are highly likely to attempt creating "open" models of mice or fruit flies if the methodology becomes available, with insect brain emulation potentially posing a higher risk of generating artificial sentience compared to creating highly intelligent systems.
- Long-term whole brain emulation of organisms such as C. elegans is expected to offer a pathway to replace animal research, based on the premise that emulating general computational processes could establish parity between biological systems and software regarding sentience.
- Citizens' assemblies are expected to be capable of determining whether proposed policies are proportionate to specific identified risks.