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      • Effective Altruism Community Growth (Global Health and Wellbeing)
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    • Longtermism
      • Biosecurity & Pandemic Preparedness
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      • Potential Risks from Advanced AI
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Professor Aaron Sloman, Honorary Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, University of Birmingham

  • Focus Area: Farm Animal Welfare
  • Content Type: Conversations

Table of Contents

    Published: July 03, 2016

    The Open Philanthropy Project spoke with Professor Sloman of the University of Birmingham as part of its investigation into which types of beings should be of moral concern, and thus a potential target for the Open Philanthropy Project’s grantmaking. This conversation focused on one particular factor plausibly relevant to whether a being should be of moral concern or not — namely, whether that being is phenomenally conscious, and what the character of its conscious experience is. Conversation focused on identifying potentially useful inputs for a “model combination / cluster thinking” method to produce rough predictions about which entities are conscious, and relevant work being done in related fields (e.g. philosophy, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence).

    Professor Sloman asked to be referred to as “Aaron” in the remainder of this document.

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