(If the human has a more than a million times as much moral status as a bacterium, which seems likely)
Apologies in advance if this sounds rude, I genuinely want to avoid guessing here: What qualifies the human for higher moral status, and how much of whatever-that-is does AI have? Are we into vibes territory for quantifying such things, or is there a specific definition of moral status that captures the “human life > bacterial life” intuition? Does it follow through the middle where we privilege pets and cattle over what they eat, but below ourselves?
Maybe I’m just not thinking hard enough about it, but at the moment, every rationale I can come up with for why humans are special breaks in one of 2 ways:
if we test for something too abstract, AI has more of it, or at least AI would score better on tests for it than we would, or
If we test for something too concrete (humans are special because we have the DNA we currently do! humans are special because we have the culture we currently do! etc) we exclude prospective distant descendants of ourselves (say, 100k years from now) whom we’d actually want to define as also morally privileged in the ways that we are.
This reminds me that I recently learned about azolla—https://theazollafoundation.org/azollas-uses/for-food/. Individuals who want to do hands-on experimentation could grow some and explore culinary uses.