EA - Sentience Institute 2022 End of Year Summary by MichaelDello

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Sentience Institute 2022 End of Year Summary, published by MichaelDello on November 25, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.SummarySentience Institute is a 501(c)3 nonprofit think tank aiming to maximize positive impact through longtermist research on social and technological change, particularly moral circle expansion. Our main focus in 2022 has been conducting high-quality empirical research, primarily surveys and behavioral experiments, to build the field of digital minds research (e.g., How will humans react to AI that seems agentic and intentional? How will we know when an AI is sentient?). Our two most notable publications this year are a report and open-access data for our 2021 Artificial Intelligence, Morality, and Sentience (AIMS) survey and our paper in Computers in Human Behavior on “Predicting the Moral Consideration of Artificial Intelligences,” and we have substantial room for more funding to continue and expand this work in 2023 and beyond.AIMS is the first nationally representative longitudinal survey of attitudes on these topics. Even today with limited AI capabilities, we are already seeing the social relationship we have with these digital minds bearing on public discourse, funding, and other events in the trajectory of AI. The CiHB predictors paper is a deep dive into demographic and psychological predictors of AI attitudes, so we can understand why certain people view these topics in the way that they do. This follows up on our 2021 conceptual paper in Futures and literature review in Science and Engineering Ethics. We have also been working to build this new field through hosting a podcast, an AI summit at the University of Chicago, and a regular intergroup call between organizations working on this topic (e.g., Center on Long-Term Risk, Future of Humanity Institute).The urgency of building this field has been underscored this year in two ways in 2022. First, AIs are rapidly becoming more advanced, as illustrated in the amazing performance of image generation models — OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion — as well as DeepMind’s Gato as a general-purpose transformer and high-performing language models Chinchilla and Google’s PaLM. Second, the topic of AI sentience had one of its first spikes in the mainstream news cycle, first as OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever tweeted “it may be that today's large neural networks are slightly conscious” in February, and then a much larger spike as Google Engineer Blake Lemoine was fired after claiming their language model LaMDA is “sentient.”In 2023, we hope to continue our empirical research as well as develop these findings into a digital minds “cause profile,” making the case for it as a highly neglected, tractable cause area in effective altruism with an extremely large scale. The perceptions, nature, and effects of digital minds are quickly becoming an important part of the trajectory of advanced AI systems and seem like they will continue to be so in medium- and long-term futures. This cause profile would be in part a more rigorous version of our blog post, “The Importance of Artificial Sentience.”2022 has been a challenging year for effective altruism funding. There was already an economic downturn when this month’s collapse of FTX, one of the two largest EA funders, left many EA organizations like us scrambling for funding and many other funders stretched thin. We expect substantially less funding in the coming months, and we need your help to continue work in this time-sensitive area, perhaps more than any other year since we were founded in 2017. We hope to raise $90,000 this giving season for our work on digital minds, such as surveys, experimental research, the cause profile, and other field-building projects. We will also continue some work on factory farming thanks to ge...