Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei raised a number of eyebrows on Monday after suggesting that superior AI fashions would possibly sometime be supplied with the flexibility to push a “button” to give up duties they could discover disagreeable. Amodei made the provocative remarks throughout an interview on the Council on International Relations, acknowledging that the thought “sounds loopy.”
“So that is—that is one other a type of matters that’s going to make me sound utterly insane,” Amodei stated throughout the interview. “I believe we should always at the least contemplate the query of, if we’re constructing these programs and so they do every kind of issues like people in addition to people, and appear to have quite a lot of the identical cognitive capacities, if it quacks like a duck and it walks like a duck, perhaps it’s a duck.”
Amodei’s feedback got here in response to an viewers query from information scientist Carmem Domingues about Anthropic’s late-2024 hiring of AI welfare researcher Kyle Fish “to take a look at, you already know, sentience or lack of thereof of future AI fashions, and whether or not they would possibly deserve ethical consideration and protections sooner or later.” Fish at present investigates the extremely contentious subject of whether or not AI fashions may possess sentience or in any other case advantage ethical consideration.
“So, one thing we’re serious about beginning to deploy is, you already know, after we deploy our fashions of their deployment environments, simply giving the mannequin a button that claims, ‘I give up this job,’ that the mannequin can press, proper?” Amodei stated. “It is just a few type of very fundamental, you already know, choice framework, the place you say if, hypothesizing the mannequin did have expertise and that it hated the job sufficient, giving it the flexibility to press the button, ‘I give up this job.’ When you discover the fashions urgent this button lots for issues which might be actually disagreeable, you already know, perhaps it’s best to—it doesn’t suggest you are satisfied—however perhaps it’s best to pay some consideration to it.”
