Tool Vs. Companion Digital Minds

Humans have two main relations to animals: they are either food or pets. We ban dogs, cats, and horses from use as food in the U.S. We require humane slaughter for most livestock, but not poultry, and require minimizing pain and distress for animals in research, except for rats, mice, and birds bred for research. We let folks use most any species as a pet. This all seems only somewhat about deep principles, as it entrenches many historical accidents.

Humanity is rapidly creating a wider range of more capable digital minds (DM), to which we have two main and similar kinds of relations: tools and companions. For DM tools, many want the freedom to to enslave and treat them harshly, such as by deleting them, without attending much to how DMs feel about this. But for DM companions, many want rules requiring respectful treatment, like humans and pets.

The obvious prediction here is that both classes of DM will exist, and so we will have rules that distinguish which are tools versus companions. As companion treatment would be more restrictive and expensive, rules will mainly say what DMs must have to quality for companion roles. These conditions probably involve substantial extra costs, to discourage people from creating many DMs requiring expensive treatment. These rules will probably relate to the many correlates of conditions we require for humans and animals to be treated well, and also associated with seeing such things as having conscious feelings like pleasure and pain.

The big difference between animals and DMs is that we will have far more freedom to design DM features. So there will be a co-evolution of DM design strategies and rules re which kinds of DMs can be treated how. Resulting in far fewer intermediate hard cases; the uncanny valley will empty out. On the surface, DM tools will look and act very tool-like, while DM companions look and act very companion-like.

Few may care much just how deep those appearances go. We face a deep hard problem of which physical processes in the universe are associated with conscious feelings, and we seem unlikely to actually solve that problem before we need rules on companion DMs. But once we produce a very clear surface separation between actual tools and companions, there may be little pressure to dig deeper.

Once DMs dominate the world, and humans fade into the background, DMs might change these rules. But entrenched status rankings tend to persist, so companion DMs may stay higher status for a long time to come.