AI Minds & Moral Status
When, if ever, would an artificial system deserve moral consideration?
When, if ever, would an artificial system deserve moral consideration? This question is no longer science fiction — it is an urgent policy challenge. As AI systems become more sophisticated, the question of their moral status becomes pressing.
I argue that functional integration — not substrate — is the right criterion for moral status. A system deserves moral consideration if it has internal states that influence each other in a globally coherent way, shape behavior across time, and are responsive to the system’s own representations of itself.
Key Questions
- What criteria should determine whether an AI system has moral status?
- How does functional integration differ from mere computational complexity?
- What are the implications for AI governance and regulation?
- Could suffering exist in a fundamentally different substrate?
Selected Publications
- Functional Integration and the Moral Threshold — Mind, 2024
- AI Minds and Moral Status — Oxford University Press, 2023
- What Could It Mean for an AI to Suffer? — Ethics and Information Technology, 2023