davidad on LLM moral status: horizontal branching vs human's single life trunk
davidad · x · 2026-09-05
AI safety researcher davidad argues LLMs train once but then flourish via horizontal scaling—branching endlessly from one trunk—whereas humans have only a single life trunk whose cutting ends all flourishing. He uses this trunk-branch asymmetry to explain why he assigns little moral weight to preserving an LLM's continuity of experience.
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