Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei raised a few eyebrows on Monday after suggesting that superior AI fashions would possibly sometime be supplied with the flexibility to push a “button” to stop duties they could discover disagreeable. Amodei made the provocative remarks during an interview on the Council on International Relations, acknowledging that the concept “sounds loopy.”
“So that is—that is one other a type of matters that’s going to make me sound fully insane,” Amodei mentioned throughout the interview. “I believe we must always no less than contemplate the query of, if we’re constructing these methods they usually do all types 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, possibly 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 have 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 the moment investigates the extremely contentious matter of whether or not AI fashions may possess sentience or in any other case benefit ethical consideration.
“So, one thing we’re enthusiastic about beginning to deploy is, you already know, once we deploy our fashions of their deployment environments, simply giving the mannequin a button that claims, ‘I stop this job,’ that the mannequin can press, proper?” Amodei mentioned. “It is just a few type of very primary, you already know, desire 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 stop this job.’ In case you discover the fashions urgent this button lots for issues which might be actually disagreeable, you already know, possibly it’s best to—it does not imply you are satisfied—however possibly it’s best to pay some consideration to it.”