Moral Status of Digital Agents: Acting Under Uncertainty

Abstract

This paper addresses how to act towards digital agents while uncertain about their moral status. It focuses specifically on the problem of how to act towards simulated minds operated by an artificial superintelligence (ASI). This problem can be treated as a sub-set of the larger problems of AI-safety (how to ensure a desirable outcome after the emergence of ASI) and also invokes debates about the grounds of moral status. The paper presents a formal structure for solving the problem by first constraining it as a sub-problem to the AI-safety problem, and then suggesting a decision-theoretic approach to how this problem can be solved under uncertainty about what the true grounds of moral status are, and whether such simulations do possess these relevant grounds. The paper ends by briefly suggesting a way to generalize the approach.