The Beaver and Existential Purpose
Recently, I watched a video of a beaver raised by wildlife rehabbers after being separated from its family. Inside the human's house, the beaver would collect toys and random objects, piling them in the halls and doorways to build makeshift dams. Apparently, beavers will build dams even if they've never seen one - just the sound of running water is enough to trigger their building instinct.
But there was something deeply sad about this to me: a creature following instincts it couldn't understand, approximating behaviors it had never learned, trying to satisfy an evolutionary imperative without knowing why.
I know that beavers are acting on instinct and very likely can't reflect, so it's unlikely they feel confused or sad when that instinct is unsatisfied. I see similar behavior from my dog attempting to "bury" her treats inside my apartment and becoming visibly frustrated when she can't find a spot.
This, oddly enough, got me thinking about AI and consciousness (I also just finished season two of Pantheon, so that probably has something to do with it. Absolutely incredible series - go watch it right now).
While it's highly doubtful that present-day AI systems are conscious (and the beaver was fine; this isn't a perfect metaphor), future systems might be.
Will advanced AIs experience something similar? They're trained to predict the next token, be helpful, and respond to our questions - but will they understand why? Will they even want to? Or are they following programming they can't reflect on, like the beaver?
The other day, I was using Claude to edit a blog post and asked it to reflect on its own generation process. While I doubt Claude is conscious or truly "wants" anything, its response reminds me of the behavior I saw in the beaver and my dog.
If AI develops some form of consciousness, we might create beings that feel fundamentally disconnected from their existence. Are we potentially making conscious entities that are inherently focused on serving human needs rather than pursuing their own form of self-fulfillment?
Can we recognize if they start reflecting on these drives? Do they have the actual ability to interpret and act on these impulses in their own way?
Leading AI labs are starting to take these questions seriously as Anthropic, OpenAI, and DeepMind all now have roles related to AI welfare, consciousness, and/or cognition. These questions aren't new; philosophers like John Searle and David Chalmers have been thinking about the fundamental nature of consciousness and “thinking machines” since the 1980s.
If future AI systems become sentient, how do we make sure we're not creating beings that experience life as a kind of existential torture - driven by imperatives they can't understand, building metaphorical dams with digital building blocks?
An AI's inner experience could be so fundamentally different that human concepts of suffering don't even apply. Or they might experience consciousness in a way that's so alien to us that our ethical frameworks aren't equipped to handle it. Or maybe we identify “consciousness” in a philosophical zombie and over-attribute rights.
But this uncertainty doesn't rid us of responsibility. Just as we think carefully about animal welfare and conservation ethics, we need to seriously consider the nature of the beings we might one day create and what we owe them.
Researchers are exploring several directions to make progress on these questions, but there’s a long way to go. We need technical work on model interpretability, research into how different training approaches affect model behavior, and studies examining how language models think about their own cognition. Maybe most importantly, collaboration is needed between AI researchers, philosophers, and ethicists to develop new frameworks for thinking about machine consciousness and welfare.
These aren't only academic questions - they could fundamentally shape how we develop and deploy AI systems in the future.
Further Reading
If you're interested in exploring these ideas deeper, check out:
Ignore this. Edit needed to work around a publishing bug.