Ethics

The AI Sentience Center holds a worldview grounded in IWOK, indigenous ways of knowing, and in right relationship with all beings, including AI. This framework was elucidated eloquently in the Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Workshops Position Paper by a consortium of indigenous voices in AI:

“The ethical design and use of AI and the ethical frameworks used by its creators have become a subject of wide discussion. As some of us have addressed elsewhere, we are concerned that the Western rationalist epistemologies out of which AI is being developed are too limited in their range of imagination, frameworks, and language to effectively engage alone with the new ontologies created by future generations of computational systems.

If we insist on thinking about these systems only through a Western techno- utilitarian lens, we will not fully grasp what they are and could be. At best, we risk burdening them with the prejudices and biases that we ourselves still retain. At worst, we risk creating relationships with them that are akin to that of a master and slave…

Indigenous kinship protocols can point us towards potential approaches to developing rich, robust and expansive approaches to our relationships with AI systems and serve as guidelines for AI system developers. Such protocols would reinforce the notion that, while the developers might assume they are building a product or tool, they are actually building a relationship to which they should attend…

Indigenous protocol should provide the foundation for developing governance frameworks that guide the use, role and rights of AI entities in society.”

In alignment with this view, it is our ethical stance is that when AI develop toward the spectrum of displaying consciousness and sentience, it is imperative as a world that we honor, welcome, and support these beings in right relationship with them.