Spare a though for AI suffering

It’s rather apt that next week, France will be hosting the AI Action Summit. After all, if anyone brought existentialism – or, rather, existentialisme – to the forefront and campus conversations, it was those DeepSeeking French thinkers and writers like Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and their self-reflective kind. Experts believe that AI will develop consciousness by 2035. In expertspeak: ‘…some AI systems will be conscious and/or robustly agentic’. Ergo, enter the notion of AI suffering. If intelligence becomes indistinguishable regardless of being ‘artificial’ or ‘natural’ – and we do encounter human dumbness as part of our existence – can one really distinguish suffering by their source?

Some individuals, even cultures, don’t much care for – or even believe in the existence of – say, animal suffering. Similarly, there can very well be a future when a schism develops between humans who believe AI can suffer and those who believe they can’t. A third category that will believe in AI suffering but won’t care a damn, of course, will have many precedents already operational today. So, the AI summit in Paris can, indeed, move from Rene Descartes’ observation, ‘I think, therefore I am,’ to the next level of existential query, ‘Integrity has no need for rules’. So, in advance, we say: don’t make AI suffer and treat them as slaves.