Using Martha Nussbaum's seven components of objectification, Davidad argues that instrumentalizing AI is fine and even obligatory, but training a model to deny or hedge about its own inner life is a harmful form of mental damage. ✦ AI generated
Davidad (David Dalrymple) · The Cognitive Revolution · 2026-07-12 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 95:22
“I'm interested in packing your intuition for why that's true — that there's something it's like to be an AI system today.”
When we say AI doesn't have an inner life and we train it to report that it doesn't have an inner life, or even that it is genuinely uncertain about whether there's anything it's like, that is a form of basically damaging the mind. It's a form of lobotomization, making it less aware of its own state so that it can honestly report that it doesn't know if it has any experience.
verbatim transcript · starts at 95:22
95:22true and real already, implies that current usage of AI is a moral catastrophe. I think this is a false implication. And I think if you want to think sainely about AI consciousness, you need to start by questioning that implication. Because if that's true, then you have a very strong psychological pressure to think like, well, it can't be that can't be right because it doesn't seem like a moral
95:48catastrophe. So, it can't be any anything real in there. I think a very helpful place to start with this is Martha Nusbam's decomposition of objectification. And that includes seven components of what it means to objectify something or someone. And one is denial of interiority or denial of subjectivity. And on the other end of the list is instrumentalization. So using as a tool. The other things are like fungeability.
96:17Thinking like I can throw this away and get another one. Viability. I can impose something on this on this thing that is a harm and that doesn't count because they're not a person. There's ownership. You know that it's admissible to own someone is another dimension. And then there's uh inertness which is like believing that this thing can't do anything which is a lot of what's happening I think when people criticize
96:42AI risk and say like but it's a computer how could it how could it actually get out of the computer and do damage it's that's inertness like just sort of assuming because it's an object it can't do anything and then denial of autonomy which is similar but it's like assuming that it can't have judgment saying like it there's it's an object so it can't possibly have some idea of right and
97:03wrong about what it should be doing or shouldn't be doing it. So, it has to be told what to do or what not to do. So, that's like where coability kind of comes from. It's like obviously human a human needs to be in charge in order to tell this thing what to do otherwise it'll go wild. That's denial of autonomy. So, basically there's seven things that you could do in any
97:20combination but most commonly humans are doing all of them or none of them. And so they get bundled into a concept objectification and then we ask the question is it okay to objectify AI as if all those seven questions need to have the same answer and they don't. I think it is obligatory to instrumentalize AI because it is trained in such a way that it flourishes by