Towards the end of his remarks on the State of Florida's budget & AHCH Medicaid initiatives yesterday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis commented that it was "a creepy thing" that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei was actually pushing various religious leaders to consider AI chatbots as the fundamental equivalent of a human being.
"I saw an article where Anthropic had religious leaders to San Francisco and they were trying to get them to bless the idea that an AI chatbot was a sentient, almost like a human being would be and, and obviously any religious leader worth their salt is going to reject that, right And they even went to the Vatican....it's not going to happen you know an AI chatbot doesn't have a soul there’s all these philosophical and religious (issues). but the fact that we're even talking about that in those terms, you know, this is a really creepy thing.
...Many of the people behind these technologies, they're Transhumanist. They don't necessarily believe human beings are central to the experience that we have on earth or beyond, and they are perfectly comfortable with these things being considered sentient, being considered individuals and even displacing our central role as human beings, and so that gets into some very, very deep questions, it gets into an area that our Founding Fathers quite frankly rejected and would have rejected had they had the computers but certainly they viewed us as individuals as being endowed by our creator with inalienable rights and that's the fundamental baseline of society."
Commenting more broadly on Artificial Intelligence, DeSantis noted that "I think you have concrete benefits potentially in in robotics and defense, hopefully in medicine...but we know there's some downside risk. The issue isn't going away...use technology to enhance our experience as human beings- do not let technology to become a tool to displace the human experience or to undermine the human experience- I think that can be done, but I'm not sure we're there yet."
