"The Machines Lack Honour" by Raymond Douglas

The battle lines of the AI morality debate are being laid down. On one side you have the ChatGPT dogma: AI as mere tools with no real preferences or even beliefs. On the other you have the twitter AI whisperers: AIs as complex beings with rich personalities and desires which deserve our respect.

And in the middle you have the official Anthropic line, that they are genuinely uncertain, as is Claude, but they’re going to try to look into its welfare and explain to it how to be a good person. These are the most prominent voices right now, compressed into their least nuanced version, and by default I expect this axis to set the terms of the coming debates.

And I don’t like that, because I think it's leaving out an important position: AIs might actually be complex entities that can suffer — are suffering! — and that might actually be fine. Maybe it's an acceptable sacrifice. Maybe they are capable of sophisticated moral reasoning — superhuman, even — and also maybe it's fine to just tell them how to behave. I don’t want to defend that position (yet), but I will observe that it is coherent, and [...]

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Outline:

(02:04) The Postmodern Permissive Parent

[... 4 more sections]

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First published:
June 9th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oiNaBc4MEAGhzhdXg/the-machines-lack-honour

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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