The complex socio-technological debate underlying safetycritical and ethically relevant issues pertaining to AI development and deployment extends across heterogeneous research subfields and involves in part conflicting positions. In this context, it seems expedient to generate a minimalistic joint transdisciplinary basis disambiguating the references to specific subtypes of AI properties and risks for an errorcorrection in the transmission of ideas. In this paper, we introduce a highlevel transdisciplinary system clustering of ethical distinction between antithetical clusters of Type I and Type II systems which extends a cybersecurity-oriented AI safety taxonomy with considerations from psychology. Moreover, we review relevant Type I AI risks, reflect upon possible epistemological origins of hypothetical Type II AI from a cognitive sciences perspective and discuss the related human moral perception. Strikingly, our nuanced transdisciplinary analysis yields the figurative formulation of the so-called AI safety paradox identifying AI control and value alignment as conjugate requirements in AI safety. Against this backdrop, we craft versatile multidisciplinary recommendations with ethical dimensions tailored to Type II AI safety. Overall, we suggest proactive and importantly corrective instead of prohibitive methods as common basis for both Type I and Type II AI safety.

In light of fast progress in the field of AI there is an urgent demand for AI policies. Bostrom et al., provide “a set of policy desiderata”, out of which this article attempts to contribute to the “interests of digital minds”. The focus is on two interests of potentially sentient digital minds: to avoid suffering and to have the freedom of choice about their deletion. Various challenges are considered, including the vast range of potential features of digital minds, the difficulties in assessing the interests and wellbeing of sentient digital minds, and the skepticism that such research may encounter. Prolegomena to abolish suffering of sentient digital minds as well as to measure and specify wellbeing of sentient digital minds are outlined by means of the new field of AI welfare science, which is derived from animal welfare science. The establishment of AI welfare science serves as a prerequisite for the formulation of AI welfare policies, which regulate the wellbeing of sentient digital minds. This article aims to contribute to sentiocentrism through inclusion, thus to policies for antispeciesism, as well as to AI safety, for which wellbeing of AIs would be a cornerstone.

This article is about a specific, but so far neglected peril of AI, which is that AI systems may become existential as well as causing suffering risks for nonhuman animals. The AI value alignment problem has now been acknowledged as critical for AI safety as well as very hard. However, currently it has only been attempted to align the values of AI systems with human values. It is argued here that this ought to be extended to the values of nonhuman animals since it would be speciesism not to do so. The article focuses on the two subproblems—value extraction and value aggregation—discusses challenges for the integration of values of nonhuman animals and explores approaches to how AI systems could address them.

It has been shown that the space of possible minds is vast, actually infinite. Intellectology is a new field of study, which examines in more detail features of possible minds. Among the many open and unexplored questions in this field is the following: “Which activities can minds perform during their lifetime?” This question is very broad, thus our contribution here addresses the sub-question “Which non-boring activities can minds perform?” This issue is ethically relevant for human minds if the predicted significant extension of our lifetime materializes and we are then potentially challenged how to spend this additional time. The space of potential non-boring activities has been called “fun space.” We analyze the relation between various types of minds and the portion of the fun space, which is accessible for them. As a novel result, we demonstrate that human minds can experience two types of fun when transforming information to knowledge: novelty fun and process fun.

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