My attitude, and the attitude of many of the alignment researchers I know, is that this problem seems really important and neglected, but we overall don't want to stop working on alignment in order to work on this. If I spotted an opportunity for research on this that looked really surprisingly good (e.g. if I thought I'd be 10x my usual productivity when working on it, for some reason), I'd probably take it.

It's plausible that I should spend a weekend sometime trying to really seriously consider what research opportunities are available in this space.

My guess is that a lot of the skills involved in doing a good job of this research are the same as the skills involved in doing good alignment research.

Maybe a question instead of an answer, but what longtermist questions does this seem like a crux for?

If AIs are unaligned with human values, that seems very bad already.

If they are aligned, then surely our future selves can figure this out?

Again, could be very dumb question, but without knowing that, it doesn't seem surprising how little attention is paid to AI sentience.

I agree this is neglected and I think this largely comes down to the focus on x-risk and the deprioritization of s-risk work.

Also just flagging the opening of NYU's Mind, Ethics, and Policy program this past fall, which focuses on digital sentience alongside other forms of sentience, e.g. invertebrates.

There are people in EA working on it.

Honestly, I think the answer to your question is that humans are, on average, completely and utterly self-centered. Look at how many people concerned with AI safety are totally indifferent to the plight of non-human animals.

Thanks for drawing more attention to this.

It's an example of an area that won't necessarily attract resources / attention from commercial sources

I wouldn't be surprised if this is part of the explanation, actually. Shifting the Overton window is a delicate art - imagine Leonardo DiCaprio shouting, "EVERYONE WILL DIE!! Also, THE METEOR COULD BE SENTIENT SO WE NEED TO LOOK AFTER IT." Not a chance. We might get somewhere with just the first part though, at least for now.

Unfortunately I think another piece of the puzzle is that the LessWrong crowd are the ones leading the conversation and they seem to care a lot less about nonhumans than EAs tend to. (Not totally sure on this - would be interested to hear others' impressions.)

The impression I get is that lots of people are like “yeah, I’d like to see more work on this & this could be very important” but there aren’t that many people who want to work on this & have ideas.

Is there evidence that funding isn’t available for this work? My loose impression is that mainstream funders would be interested in this. I suppose it’s an area where it’s especially hard to evaluate the promisingness of a proposal, though.

Reasons people might not be interested in doing this work: — Tractability — Poor feedback loops — Not many others in the community to get feedback from — Has to deal with thorny and hard-to-concretize theoretical questions

Reasons people might want to work on this: — Importance and neglectedness — Seems plausible that one could become one of the most knowledgeable EAs on this topic in not much time — Interdisciplinary; might involve interacting a lot with the non-EA world, academia, etc — Intellectually stimulating

See also: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/robert-long-artificial-sentience/

https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.07103

Callum - interesting question. My sense is that there's a small to moderate amount of work by EAs and EA-adjacent folks on AI sentience, AI suffering risks (S-risk), digital sentience, AI rights, etc. - although it doesn't tend to get much attention or discussion on EA Forum.

There might be a couple reasons for this (speculatively):

First, EAs tend to be very focused on AI X-risk, and any attention to AI sentience raises uncomfortable trade-offs regarding development and regulation of AGI. For example, population ethics applied to digital sentience might lead us to become quite 'pronatalist' about maximizing numbers of sentient AIs over the long term. This could leads people into the kind of reckless, radical 'e/acc' accelerationism that says it's fine for humanity to go extinct as long as we're replaced by sentient AIs. 

Second, sentience is a topic studied mostly by psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers of mind -- fields that tend to be under-represented in EA compared to economists, computer scientists, and moral philosophers. Much of the EA interest in sentience is centered in the animal welfare area, where people really struggle with theoretical and empirical research about which animals are sentience versus not (e.g. whether oysters, shrimp, or crickets are sentient). If we can't even clarify very effectively whether oysters are sentient (given that we have a relatively good understanding of how nervous systems evolve, and what adaptive functions they implement), it seems even more challenging to figure out how to determine which AI systems are sentient.