“Al Welfare Open Questions: The Problem of Genuine Desire” by Prof. Simon GOLDSTEIN

03 Feb 2025

Hybrid Research Seminar

Do Als have welfare? One step in answering this question is figuring out whether they have desires. For example, do Als engage in complex planning that can only be explained in terms of promoting goals? But even if Als have desires in some sense, the kind of desire they have may not contribute to welfare. This is the problem of “genuine desire”. Cases of compulsion, addiction, and emotional disturbance in humans suggest that sometimes people can be systematically motivated to pursue goals whose satisfaction does not make their lives go better. The challenge is to identify a condition on genuine desire that explains which desires contribute to welfare and which do not. Then we can test whether Als satisfy this condition. In this talk, I’ll critically compare three conditions: that genu ine desires produce pleasure, that genuine desires are reflectively endorsed, and that genuine de sires are integrated into the agent’s reinforcement learning processes. I’ll argue that reflective en dorsement is the best approach, and that this makes it relatively easy for Als to have welfare.

Venue: LKK302 & Zoom Seminar

For enquiries, please call 2616 7445 or e-mail to [email protected]