Transcript for #107 – Peter Singer: Suffering in Humans, Animals, and AI

I think I was conscious of the fact that there's a lot of suffering in the world pretty much as soon as I was able to understand anything about my family and its background because I lost three of my four grandparents in the Holocaust and obviously I knew why I only had one grandparent and she herself had been in the camps and survived so I think I knew a lot about that pretty early.

The war had many impact. I think one of them, a beneficial impact, is that it showed what racism and authoritarian government can do and at least as far as the West was concerned. I think that meant that I grew up in an era in which there wasn't the kind of overt racism and antisemitism that had existed for my parents in Europe. I was growing up in Australia and certainly that was clearly seen as something completely unacceptable. There was also a fear of a further outbreak of war which this time we expected would be nuclear because of the way the Second World War had ended. So there was this overshadowing of my childhood of that possibility that I would not live to grow up and be an adult because of catastrophic nuclear war. There was a film on the beach was made in which the city that I was living Melbourne was the last place on earth to have living human beings because of the nuclear cloud that was spreading from the north. So that certainly gave us a bit of that sense. There were many, you know, there were clearly many other legacies that we got of the war as well and the whole set up of the world and the cold war that followed, all of that has its roots in the second world war.

I find it hard to see positive aspects in war and some of the things that other people think of as positive and beautiful, maybe questioning. So there's a certain kind of patriotism people say during wartime we all pull together, we all work together against the common enemy. And that's true and outside enemy does unite a country and in general it's good for countries to be united and have common purposes, but it also engenders a kind of a nationalism and a patriotism that can't be questioned and that I'm more skeptical about it.

It may bring people close together, but there are other ways of bonding and being close to people, I think, without the suffering and death that war entails.

Suffering is a conscious state. There can be no suffering for a being who is completely unconscious. And it's distinguished from other conscious states in terms of being one that considered just in itself. We would rather be with that. It's a conscious state that we want to stop if we're experiencing or we want to avoid having again if we've experienced it in the past. And that's as I say emphasize for its own sake because of course people will say well suffering strengthens the spirit it has good consequences and sometimes it does have those consequences and of course sometimes we might undergo suffering we said ourselves a challenge to run a marathon or climb a mountain or even just to go to the dentist so that the toothache doesn't get worse even though we know the dentist is going to hurt us to some extent So I'm not saying that we never choose suffering, but I am saying that other things being equal, we would rather not be in that state of consciousness.

In practice, I don't think we have a will eliminate suffering. So I think that little drop of poison as you put it, or if you like, the contrasting dash of an unpleasant colour, perhaps something like that, and otherwise how many are some beautiful composition, that is going to always be there. If you ask me whether in theory, if we could get rid of it, we should. I think the answer is whether in fact, we would be better off or whether in terms of by eliminating the suffering, we would also eliminate some of the highs, the positive highs. And if that's so then we might be prepared to say it's worth having a minimum of suffering in order to have the best possible experiences as well.

I think they're both. I think this is true for poverty as well as suffering. There's an objective level of suffering or of poverty where we're talking about objective indicators like you're constantly hungry. You don't, you can't get enough food. You're constantly cold. You can't get warm. You have some physical pains that you'll never read of. I think those things are objective, but it may also be true that if you do get rid of that and you get to the stage where all of those basic needs have been met. there may still be then new forms of suffering that develop and perhaps that's what we're seeing in the affluent societies we have that people get bored for example they don't need to spend so many hours a day earning money to get enough to eat and shelter so now they bored they like a sense of purpose that can happen and that then is a kind of a relative suffering there's distinct from the objective forms of suffering

It would be of interest to me if we had eliminated all of the objective forms of suffering, which I think of as generally more severe and also perhaps easier at this stage anyway to know how to eliminate. So yes, in some future state, when we eliminated those objective forms of suffering, I would be interested in trying to eliminate the relative forms as well. But that's not a practical need for me at the moment.

Suffering can be a creative force. I think I'll repeating what I said about the highs and whether we need some of the lows to experience the highs. So it may be that suffering makes us more creative and we regard that as worthwhile. Maybe that brings some of those highs with it that we would not have had if we'd had no suffering. I don't really know. Many people have suggested that and I certainly can't have no basis for denying it. And if it's true, then I would not wonder will emulate suffering completely.

Yes, that's at the present stage of where the world's population is, that's the focus.

Certainly most of us have potential for both good and evil. I'm not prepared to say that everyone is capable of evil. Maybe some people who even in the worst of circumstances would not be capable of it. But most of us are very susceptible to environmental influences. So when we look at things that we were talking about previously, let's say what the Nazis did during the Holocaust. I think it's quite difficult to say I know that I would not have done those things, even if I were in the same circumstances as those who did them, even if let's say I had grown up under the Nazi regime and had been indoctrinated with racist ideas, had also had the idea that I must obey orders, follow the commands of the Fura. Plus, of course, perhaps the threat that if I didn't do certain things, I might get sent to the Russian front, and that would be a pretty grim fate. I think it's really hard for anybody to say, nevertheless, I know I would not have killed those Jews or whatever.

Truly be able to say it. I think very few less than 10%.

Right. I have to say, I simply don't know. I would like to hope that I would have been one of the 10% but I don't really have any basis for flaming that I would have been different from the majority. Is it a worthwhile thing to contemplate? It would be interesting if we could find a way of really finding these answers. Obviously, is quite a bit of research on people during the Holocaust on how ordinary Germans got led to do terrible things. And there's also studies of the resistance, heroic people in the white rose group, for example, who resisted it even though they were likely to die for it. But I don't know whether these studies really can answer your larger question of how many people would have been capable of doing that.

True, but I think we do face those challenges today, and I think we can still ask ourselves those questions. So one stand that I took more than 40 years ago now was to stop eating meat, come a vegetarian at a time. When you hardly met anybody who was a vegetarian or if you did, they might have been Hindu or they might have had some weird theories about meat and health. I know thinking about making that decision. I was convinced that it was the right thing to do, but I still did have to think, are all my friends going to think that I'm a crank, because I'm now refusing to eat meat. So I'm not saying there were any terrible sanctions, obviously. But I thought about that, and I guess I decided, well, I still think this is the right thing to do, and if I'll put up with that, if it happens, and one or two friends were clearly uncomfortable with that decision. But that was pretty minor compared to the historical examples that we've been talking about. But other issues that we have around to like global poverty and what we ought to be doing about that is another question where people I think can have the opportunity to take a stand on what's the right thing to do now. Climate change would be a third question where again, people are taking a stand. I can look at Greta Tuneberg there and say, well, I think it must have taken a lot of courage for a school girl to say, I'm going to go on strike about climate change and see what happened.

If we ever develop robots capable of consciousness, capable of having their own internal perspective on what's happening to them, so that their lives can go well or badly for them, then robots should have rights. Until that happens, they shouldn't.

I certainly think that Consciousness is a prerequisite for suffering. You can't suffer if you're not conscious. But is it true that every being that is conscious will suffer or has to be capable of suffering? I suppose you've got to imagine a kind of consciousness, especially if we can construct it artificially, that's capable of experiencing pleasure. But just automatically cuts at the consciousness when they're suffering. So they're like, you know, instant anesthesia, as soon as something is going to cause suffering. So that's possible. But doesn't exist as far as we know on this planet yet. You asked what is consciousness? Philosophers often talk about it as they're being a subject of experiences. So you and I and everybody listening to this is a subject of experience. There is a conscious subject who is taking things in, responding to it in various ways feeling good about it, feeling bad about it. And that's different from the kinds of artificial intelligence we have now. I take out my phone. I ask Google directions to where I'm going. Google gives me the directions and I choose to take a different way. Google doesn't care. It's not like I'm a fending Google or anything like that. There is no subject of experience as there. And I think that's the indication that Google AI we have now is not conscious, or at least that level of AI is not conscious. And that's the way to think about it. Now it may be difficult to tell, of course, whether certain AI is or isn't conscious. It may mimic consciousness and we can't tell if it's on a mimicking it or if it's the real thing. But that's what we're looking for. Is there a subject of experience, a perspective on the world from which things can go well or badly from that perspective?

Yes, that kind of capability may be closer. But I don't think it follows that we have to give them rights. I suppose the The argument for saying that in those circumstances, we should give them rights is that if we don't, we'll harden ourselves against other beings who are not robots and who really do suffer. That's a possibility that, you know, if we get used to looking at it being suffering and saying, yeah, we don't have to do anything about that, that being doesn't have any rights. Maybe we'll feel the same about animals, for instance. And interestingly, among philosophers and thinkers who denied that we have any direct duties to animals, this includes people like Thomas Aquinas and Emmanuel Kant, They did say, yes, but still it's better not to be cruel to them, not because of the suffering we're inflicting on the animals, but because if we are, we may develop a cruel disposition, and this will be bad for humans, you know, because we would more likely be cruel to other humans, and that would be wrong. So, but you don't accept that. I don't accept that as the basis of the argument for why we shouldn't be cruel to animals. I think the basis of the argument for why we shouldn't be cruel to animals is just that we're inflicting suffering on them and the suffering is a bad thing. But possibly, I might accept some sort of parallel to that argument as a reason why you shouldn't be cruel to these robots that mimic the symptoms of pain if it's going to be harder for us to distinguish.

So there is a philosophical view, has been held about humans, which is rather like what you're talking about. And that's behaviorism. So behaviorism was employed both in psychology. People like B. of Skinner was a famous behaviorist. But in psychology it was more kind of what is it that makes this science, what you need to have behavior, because that's what you can observe, you kind of observe consciousness. But in philosophy, the view just defended by people like Gilbert Ryle, who was a professor of philosophy at Oxford, wrote a book called The Conceptive Mind, in which, you know, in this kind of phase, this is in the 40s of linguistic philosophy, he said, well, the meaning of a term is its use, and we use terms like, so-and-so is in pain when we see somebody riding or screaming or trying to escape some stimulus. And that's the meaning of the term. So that's what it is to be in pain. And you point to the behavior. And Norman Malcolm, who was another philosopher in the school from Cornell, had the view that, you know, so what is it to dream after all? We can't see other people's dreams. Well, when people wake up and say, I've just had a dream of, you know, here I was undressed walking down the main street or whatever it is you've dreamt. That's what it is to have a dream. It's to basically to wake up and recall something. So you could apply this to what you're talking about and say, so what it is to be in pain is to exhibit these symptoms of pain behavior and therefore these robots are in pain. That's what the word means. But nowadays not many people think that Raul's kind of philosophical behaviorism is really very plausible. So I think they would say the same about you of you.

That's right. That would be my view. But that's consistent across with the idea that it's part of our nature to respond to this display if it's reasonable, authentically done. And therefore it's understandable that people would feel this. And maybe as I said, it's even a good thing that they do feel it. And you wouldn't want to harden yourself against it because then you might harden yourself against beings who are really suffering.

I don't know enough about the programming that we're going to this really to answer this question. But I presume that somebody who doesn't know more about this could look at the program and see whether we can explain the behaviours in a passimonious way that doesn't require us to suggest that some sort of consciousness is emerged. Or alternatively, whether you're in a situation where you say, I don't know how this is happening. The program does generate a kind of artificial general intelligence, which is autonomous, you know, starts to do things itself and is autonomous of the basic programming that's set it up. And so it's quite possible that actually we have achieved consciousness in a system of artificial intelligence.

Yeah, that's there is an interesting issue. I would say that if we have serious doubts and think it might be conscious, then we ought to try to give it the benefit of the doubt. Just as I would say with animals, I think we can be highly confident that vertebrates are conscious, but when we get done and some invertebrates like the octopus, but with insects it's much harder to be confident of that. I think we should give them the benefit of the data where we can, which means I think it would be wrong to torture and insect but this doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong to sleep on a mosquito that's about to bite you and stop you getting to sleep so I think you you try to achieve some balance in these circumstances of uncertainty

Certainly, the key idea that underlies that book is the concept of speciesism, which I did not invent that term. I took it from a man called Richard Ryder who was in Oxford when I was and I saw a pamphlet that he'd written about experiments on chimpanzees that used that term. But I think I contributed to making it philosophically more precise and to getting it into a broader audience. And the idea is that we have a bias or prejudice against taking seriously the interests of beings who are not members of our species. Just as in the past, Europeans, for example, had a bias against taking seriously the interests of Africans, racism, and men have had a bias against taking seriously the interests of women, sexism. So I think something analogous, not completely identical, but something analogous, goes on and has gone on for a very long time with the way humans see themselves vis-à-vis animals. We see ourselves as more important. We see animals as existing to serve our needs in various ways and you can find this very explicit in earlier philosophers from Aristotle through to Kant and others, and either we don't need to take their interest into a candidate or we can discount it because they're not humans. They can't a little bit, but they don't can't nearly as much as humans do. My book I use is that that attitude is responsible for a lot of the things that we do to animals that are wrong, confining them indoors in very crowded, cramped conditions in factory farms to produce meat or eggs or milk more cheaply, using them in some research that's by no means essential for survival or well-being and a whole lot, you know, some of the sports and things that we do to animals. So I think that's unjustified because I think the significance of pain and suffering does not depend on the species of the being who is in pain or suffering any more than it depends on the race or sex with the being who is in pain or suffering. And I think we ought to rethink our treatment of animals along the lines of saying if the pain is just as great in animal then it's just as bad that it happens as if it were a human.

I might ask the AGI what she was feeling. Well, does she have feelings? And if she says yes to describe those feelings, to describe what they were like to see what the phenomenal account of consciousness is like? That's one question. I might also try to find out if the AGI has a sense of itself. So, for example, the idea, would you, you know, we often ask people, so suppose you were in a car accident and your brain were transplanted into someone else's body, do you think you would survive or would it be the person whose body was still surviving, you know, your body having been destroyed? And most people say, I think if my brain was transplanted along with my memories and so on, I would survive. So we could ask AI those kinds of questions if they were transferred to a different piece of hardware would they survive? What would survive? Yeah, that's what it says.

Presumably digital beings need to be running on some kind of hardware.

You could move it to a different kind of hardware. You know, and I could say, look, you know, your hardware is getting worn out. We're going to transfer you to a fresh piece of hardware, so we're going to shut you down for a time, but don't worry. You'll be running very soon on a nice fresh piece of hardware. And you could imagine this conscious AGR saying, that's fine. I don't mind having a little rest. Just make sure you don't lose me.

Yes, that's very interesting. I'd love to be able to have that increased bandwidth, and I want better access to my memory, I have to say too, as you know, I talked to my wife about things that we did 20 years ago, something, her memory is often better about particular events, where we, who was at that event, What did he or she wear or even she may know and I have not the finest idea about this but perhaps it's somewhere in my memory and if I had this extended memory I could I could search that particular year and for you run those things I think that would be great

Well, Gmail is fantastic for that because, you know, people email me as if they know me well, and I haven't got a clue who they are, but then I search for their name. I just got emailed me in 2007, and I know who they are now.

Presumably, it's possible to do that. I know that a lot of people who think that there's a real danger that we weren't, that we'll more or less accidentally lose control of IGI. Do you have that fear yourself personally? I'm not quite sure what to think. I talked to philosophers like Nick Bostrum and Toby Ord and they think that this is a real problem where you need to worry about. Then I talked to people who work for Microsoft or DeepMind or somebody and they say, no, we're not really that close to producing AGI super intelligence.

Yes, I think it's a problem. I think that's a valid point. Of course, when you say eventually, that raises the question how far off is that and is there something that we can do about it now because if we're talking about this is going to be 100 years in the future and you consider how rapidly I knowledge of artificial intelligence has grown in the last 10 or 20 years. It seems unlikely that there's anything much we could do now, that would influence whether this is going to happen 100 years in the future. People in 80 years in the future would be in a much better position to say, this is what we need to do to prevent this happening than we are now. So to some extent, I find that reassuring. I'm all in favour of some people doing research into this to see if indeed it is that far off or if we are in a position to do something about it sooner. I'm very much of the view that extinction is a terrible thing and therefore even if the risk of extinction is very small, if we can reduce that risk, that's something that we ought to do. My disagreement with some of these people who talk about long-term risks, extinction risks It's only about how much priority that should have as compared to present questions.

And people say it's not an existential risk, because it'll always be possibilities of some humans existing, froming Antarctica, or more than Siberia, or something of that sort.

So wouldn't you? No, certainly if you treat it as an infinity, then it plays havoc within any calculations. Arguably we shouldn't, only one of the ethical assumptions that goes into this is that the loss of future lives that is of merely possible lives of beings who may never exist at all. is in some way comparable to the sufferings or deaths of people who do exist at some point. And that's not clear to me. I think there's case for saying that, but I also think there's a case for taking the other view. So that has some impact on it. Of course, you might say, yes, but still if there's someone certainly about this and the costs of extinction are infinite, then still it's going to overwhelm in everything else. But I suppose I'm not convinced of that. I'm not convinced that it's really infinite here. And even Nick Bostrom in his discussion that this doesn't claim that there'll be an infinite number of lives. And what is it? 10 to the 56th or something? It's a vast number that I think he calculates. This is assuming we can upload consciousness onto these, you know, digital forms and therefore there'll be much more energy efficient, but he calculates the amount of energy in the universe. So the numbers are vast, but non-infinite, which gives you some prospect, maybe, of resisting some of the argument.

Utilitarianism is the ethical view that the right thing to do is the act that has the greatest expected utility where what that means is it's the act that will produce the best consequences discounted by the odds that you won't be able to produce those consequences that something will go wrong. But in simple case, let's assume we have certainty about what the consequence directions will be, then the right action is the action that will produce the best consequences.

No, it's a difficult calculation and actually there's one thing that I need to add and that is utilitarians Certainly the classical utilitarians think that by best consequences we're talking about happiness and the absence of pain and suffering. There are other consequentialists who are not really utilitarians who say there are different things that could be good consequences. Justice, freedom, you know, human dignity, knowledge, they all kind of good consequences too. And that makes the calculations even more difficult because then you need to know how to balance these things off. If you are just talking about well-being using that term to express happiness in the absence of suffering, I think the calculation becomes more manageable in a philosophical sense. It's still in practice. We don't know how to do it. We don't know how to measure quantities of happiness and misery. We don't know how to calculate the probabilities, the different actions will produce this or that. So at best we can use it as a rough guide to different actions. And one way we have to focus on the short term consequences because we just can't really predict all of the longer term ramifications.

I think it's possible that that gets overwritten by benefits to very large numbers of individuals. I think that can be the right answer. But before we conclude that it is the right answer, we have to know how severe the suffering is and how that compares with the benefits. So I tend to think that extreme suffering is worse than or is further if you like below the neutral level than extreme happiness or bliss is above it. So when I think about the worst experiences possible and the best experiences possible, I don't think of them as equidistant from neutral. So like it's a scale that goes from minus 100 through zero as a neutral level to plus 100. Because I know that I would not exchange an hour of my most pleasurable experiences for an hour of my most painful experiences. Even I wouldn't have an hour of my most painful experiences even for two hours or ten hours of my most painful experiences. Do I have a curriculum?

Yeah. Well, what's the exchange rate? So that's the question. What is the exchange rate? But I think it can be quite high. So that's why you shouldn't just assume that it's okay to make one person suffer extremely in order to make two people much better off. It might be a much larger number. But at some point, I do think You should aggregate and and the result will be even though it violates our intuitions of justice and fairness whatever it might be Giving priority to those who are worse off at some point I still think that will be the right thing to do.

And yeah, that would be great if we could if we really knew that if we could really could calculate that.

I don't think it's hopeless, I think it's difficult to get converge towards agreement at least at present because some people say, you know, I've got different views about justice and I think you ought to give priority to those who are worse off, even though I acknowledge that the gains that the worse off are making are less than the gains that those who are sort of medium badly off could be making. So we still have all of these intuitions that we argue about. So I don't think we would get agreement, but the fact that we wouldn't get agreement doesn't show that there isn't a right answer there.

Politically, I'm still a Democrat despite looking at the flaws in democracy and the way it doesn't work always very well. So I don't see a better option than allowing the public to vote for governments in accordance with their policies. And I hope that they will vote for policies that reduce the suffering of animals and reduce the suffering of distant humans, whether geographically distant or distant because they have future humans. But I recognize that democracy isn't really well set up to do that. And in a sense, you could imagine a wise and benevolent, you know, omnibenevolent leader who would do that better than democracy's could, but in the world in which we live, It's difficult to imagine that this leader isn't going to be corrupted by a variety of influences. We've had so many examples of people who've taken power with good intentions and then have ended up being corrupt and favoring themselves. So I don't know. That's why I don't know that we have a better system than democracy to make this decision.

That's right. You can download either the ebook or the audio book free from the life you can save.org.

The main thing I want to do in the book is to make people realize that it's not difficult to help people in extreme poverty, that there are highly effective organizations now that are doing this, that they've been independently assessed and verified by research teams that are expert in this area. And that it's a fulfilling thing to do for at least part of your life. We can't all be saints, but at least one of your goals should be to really make a positive contribution to the world and to do something to help people who through no fault of their own are in very dire circumstances and living our life that is barely or perhaps not at all a decent life for a human being to live.

There are many different kinds of ways of living as an effective altruist. And if you're at the point where you're thinking about your long term career, I'd recommend you take a look at a website called 80,000 hours, 80,000 hours.org, which looks at ethical career choices. And they range from, for example, going to work on Wall Street so that you can earn a huge amount of money and then donate most of it to effective charities. to going to work for a really good non-profit organization so that you can directly use your skills and ability and hard work to further a good cause or perhaps going into politics maybe small chances but big high-offs in politics go to work in the public service where if you're talented you might rise to a high level where you can influence decisions do research in an area where the payoff could be great. There are a lot of different opportunities, but two few people who are even thinking about those questions, they're just going along in some sort of preordained rut to particular careers, maybe they think they'll earn a lot of money and have a comfortable life, but they may not find that as fulfilling as actually knowing that they're making a positive difference to the world.

So I do actually set out suggested levels of giving because people often ask me about this. A popular answer is, you know, give 10%, the traditional ties that's recommended in Christianity and also Judaism. You know, why should it be the same percentage irrespective of your income? Tax scales reflect the idea that the more income you have, the more you can pay tax. And I think the same is true in what you can give. So I do set out a progressive donor scale, which starts at 1% for people on modest incomes and rises to 33 and a third percent for people who are really earning a lot. And my idea is that I don't think any of these amounts really impose real hardship on people because they are progressive and get to income. So I think anybody can do this and can know that they're doing something significant to play their part in reducing the huge gap between people in extreme poverty in the world and people living affluent lives.

Yeah, so I make both those arguments that it is an ethical requirement and kind of world we live in today to help people in great need when we can easily do so. But also that it is a rewarding thing and there's good psychological research showing that people who give more tend to be more satisfied with their lives. And I think this has something to do with having a purpose that's larger than yourself. And therefore, if you're like never being bored sitting around, what will I do next? I've got nothing to do. In a world like this, there are many good things that you can do. And enjoy doing them, plus you're working with other people in the effective altruism movement. forming a community of other people with similar ideas and they tend to be interesting, thoughtful and good people as well and having friends of that sort is another big contribution to having a good life.

Clearly, as you get into your 70s, you can't help thinking about your own mortality. But I don't know that I have great insights into that from my philosophy. I don't think there's anything after the death of my body, assuming that we won't be able to upload my mind into anything at the time when I die. So I don't think there's any afterlife for anything to look forward to in that sense.

I suppose the fact that you have only a limited time to achieve the things that you want to achieve gives you some sort of motivation to get going and achieving them. And if we thought we were immortal, we might say, I can put that off for another decade or two. So there's that about it. But otherwise, no, I'd rather have more time to do more. I'd also like to be able to see how things go, that I'm interested in. Is climate change going to turn out to be as dire as a lot of scientists say that it is going to be? Will we somehow scrape through with less damage than we thought? I'd really like to know the answers to those questions, but I guess I'm not going to.

I think the meaning of life is the meaning we give to it. I don't think that we were brought into the universe for any kind of larger purpose. But given that we exist, I think we can recognize that some things are objectively bad. Extreme suffering is an example and other things are objectively good, like having a rich fulfilling enjoyable, pleasurable life. And we can try to do our part in reducing the bad things and increasing the good things.

Yes, so do as much of the good things as you can and there's a little bit of the bad things.

Thanks very much, like it's been really interesting talking to you.