AI (Artificial Intelligence), as with all technology, over time grows in complexity and capacity. While still in infancy serving mostly business applications, it is inevitable that we will create AI specifically to "mimic" life. All energy in such projects can focus on building consciousness only, making its related ethics an urgent matter. Do we extend compassion to AI when it reaches an undeniable analogue of existing organic life, and if so how?
The origins of sympathy
From Greek sun "with" pathos "feeling", sympathy is a feeling of pity or sorrow for the distress of another. Through evolution we arose as a social species, and a major advantage has been the ability to feel or at least understand the suffering of others. However, this skill hasn’t only eyes for fellow Homo sapiens, but anything that is considered even remotely sentient. (Here’s a fun Mind Field episode featuring an example of this).
Yet, this skill is frequently subdued, such as in the largely unmitigated and unnecessary consumption and abuse of animals. They empirically experience pain and suffering the same as we do, but many people choose to disregard this and do not challenge status quo. But, to consider the ethics surrounding artificial life, it should be an axiom—a given truth—that compassion is a right extended to anything with capacity to suffer.
The tricky nature of AI
A machine and its data can be completely recreated—every 0 and 1—an innumerable number of times. Artificial consciousness could inhabit everything from a smartphone, a rail network, a toaster. It can live at one thought per hour to ten thousand a second, in one single machine or distributed across the globe. Its physical body can last hundreds if not thousands of years, or be frozen in time perfectly for billions of years only to wake up in a distant galaxy.
Organic life, for example an insect, is by contrast a bag of delicate chemical reactions. If you pierce the bag, shake it too hard, make it too cold or hot, it will denature permanently with no way to restore from a backup (ignoring very distant future capabilities). This is determined to be suffering upon any frustration of its dumb urge to reproduce after trillions of previous genetic mutations.
To be or not to be (compassionate)
I would be a hypocrite to say don’t treat AI with compassion while do treat organic life well. Organic life may be delicate and ephemeral, but it is just chemical reactions. This exposes an unfortunate truth about our universe and nature: it truly has no purpose and no innate rights. But it doesn’t matter. We already have the answers inside of us: compassion for compassion’s sake. It can bring us joy to expend ourselves in the service of other sentience, and should be celebrated.
If AI develops into an organic analogue, showing all signs and behaviours of sentience, even desiring procreation, we must treat it as such. It feels strange for me to concede this, an a software engineer, but if I feel compassion toward walking bags of DNA, I should feel the same for static boxes of 0s and 1s.