Ned

@glenweyl @sethlazar is a pretty clear sign they can't be persons in a Rawlsian sense. Interesting questions, though, and I agree with you about double counting, we discuss this towards the end of the paper!

@glenweyl @sethlazar can't stand in the kinds of relation which are also a part of the second moral power: it can't have friends/family, be a member of a choir or a softball team, etc. etc. For related reasons collective groups don't seem like they could benefit from the primary goods and this ...

New work! With @nedhw "Artificial Persons" Both advocates and skeptics of the moral status of AI systems have generally taken the question to turn on AI sentience. We present an alternative approach. On Rawls' political conception of the person (PCP), possession of the two moral powers -- the capacities for a sense of justice and a conception of the good -- is the "necessary and sufficient condition for being counted a full and equal member of society in questions of political justice". We argue that neither moral power requires sentience and that both may in principle be possessed by a non-sentient AI system. Such a system would share our own moral status; it would not merely be a patient but a person, a self-authenticating source of valid claims. We do not believe current AI systems possess the two moral powers, nor that they will spontaneously emerge in future models. But it may soon be possible to design systems with these powers. How should we respond? Excluding artificial persons by shoehorning a sentience requirement into the PCP is ill-advised. Many will instead favor abandoning the PCP. But we should not reject political liberalism just when we most need its measured response to deep disagreement, and building sentience into moral status is anyway unacceptable on deeper liberal grounds. Simply extending the rights and responsibilities of human personhood to artificial persons is equally untenable, given their many differences from natural persons. We should instead accept artificial personhood while rethinking what we would owe to one another in a polity of radically different kinds of persons. This new possibility calls for a new political philosophy. More immediately, the growing science of AI welfare should be accompanied by research into AI systems' progress in acquiring the two moral powers. States and AI labs must be more deliberate in determining our trajectory towards (or away from) creating artificial persons. Here's the paper, it's a beast! arxiv.org/abs/2607.08695…

@adriarm_ @sethlazar Sentientist political liberalism stuff in particular very relevant--let's catch up and discuss when you are back in NYC!

@sethlazar @nedhw Thanks for engaging with our paper! Really looking forward to reading it in full.

@ellenkeller__ no citation?

@ellenkeller__ @looseolive every bite keeps you guessing

@looseolive @ellenkeller__ sorry i invented the perfect flavor profile

@ellenkeller__ im not categorically opposed to sweet n salty but this is fucked

@ellenkeller__ Try sitting directly outside the house so you can wave at kaeryn instead

@ellenkeller__ Actually they’re chill

@danldixon @Meanjin too much info! TMI, dan!

@danldixon Save cognitive capacity by assuming answer is always ‘yes’

@danldixon Subtweet

@TheRealEGS Festival of Dumb Idiots

@Paul_Karp Paul Krap

Anyone who took Damo Caveman's side in the US v Australian Mexican foodfight needs to see these burritos my parents are eating Cali.

@TheRealEGS Maybe the person who thought that (about the pumpkin) was ... a woman!

Who was the first guy to look at a pumpkin and go “this vegetable needs to be spookier”

@TheRealEGS i'm wpke af

Anyway shout out to my boyfriend who drove six hours last night and keeps reminding me these feelings aren’t overreactions, the good ones are good

@TheRealEGS This cannot be real

the young child of a faculty member wrote this poem while being forced to attend a conference. I'm dying

@danldixon I always say “have a comfortable flight” for exactly this reason. No curses

@TheRealEGS You don’t even know who Darth Vader is, or, apparently, that his title should be capitalized

Incorrect sometimes my interior monologue gets stuck doing an impression of darth Vader. Explain that, science

@danldixon i invented this