Edge of Sentience - from Octopuses to Organoids
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Can octopuses feel pain and pleasure? Could there even be rudimentary feelings in miniature models of the human brain, grown from human stem cells? And what about AI? These are questions about the edge of sentience, and they are subject to enormous, disorienting uncertainty. Birch's book The Edge of Sentience presents a precautionary framework designed to help us reach ethically sound, evidence-based decisions despite our uncertainty. This talk will introduce some of the main ideas from the book.
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