State senator introduces urgent bill to ban controversial farming tactic before it spreads — here's why experts say it can't wait
The bill, introduced in mid-April, is sponsored by Monica R. Martinez in the state Senate and by Tony Simone in the Assembly. If passed, the legislation would outlaw aquaculture that aims to raise any species of octopus for human consumption. It would also prohibit the business sale, possession, and transport of farmed octopuses in the state.
While there are no such octopus farms in New York at present, the state would join California and Washington in preemptively banning the practice, according to World Animal News.
In March 2023, the BBC reported that the world's first octopus farm had been proposed in Spain, to the great concern of scientists and animal advocates. The proposal raised a number of environmental and ethical concerns.
For one, as WAN noted, because octopuses are carnivorous and "require a high volume of food, about three times their own body weight," overfishing for feed is a risk of commercially farming the creatures.
Commercial farming practices could also introduce pollutants and otherwise disrupt delicate marine ecosystems, per WAN.
The ethical questions involved are serious as well. Octopuses are curious, highly intelligent, exceptionally skilled creatures. In captivity, they're notorious for breaking out of aquarium tanks. The BBC reported that a 2021 study led to the animals "being recognised as 'sentient beings'" in the United Kingdom's Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act. Attempting to contain them in the sort of system typical of a commercial farm would likely border on cruelty and could lead to concerning behavior.
The new bill comes after a pair of laws, also sponsored by Martinez, were passed by the NY legislature to restrict animal trafficking and assign stricter punishments for animal cruelty. If passed, the octopus farming ban would result in a daily fine of $1,000 per offense, according to WAN, and the fines would be collected by the Department of Environmental Conservation.
The bill is still in its early stages. Next, it needs to pass through the Environmental Conservation Committee before ultimately it can be brought to votes in the Senate and the Assembly.
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What Today's Leading Philosophers Have To Say About Conscious AI
TOPSHOT - A robot using artificial intelligence is displayed at a stand during the International ... More Telecommunication Union (ITU) AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva, on May 30, 2024. Humanity is in a race against time to harness the colossal emerging power of artificial intelligence for the good of all, while averting dire risks, a top UN official said. (Photo by Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP) (Photo by FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP via Getty Images) It is an illusion. Consciousness, that is. Earlier this month, leading experts in the realm of the mind gathered in Heraklion, Crete, for the International Center for Consciousness Studies (ICCS) annual conference. The topic for this year was Artificial Intelligence and Sentience. All the participating philosophers, psychologists, neurosurgeons, cognitive scientists and entrepreneurs agreed; the matter at hand is no longer just a subgenre of science fiction. According to David Hulme, CEO of Conscium, a machine consciousness research group and consultancy based in London, we have approximately five years before AI becomes a fully autonomous conscious agent. Given the numerous ethical questions associated with machine consciousness, Hulme and Conscium are as invested in the guiding principles of the research as the research itself. Their principles are readily available as an open letter on their website. The general public seems to agree about the imminence of conscious AI. Clara Colombatto, a University of Waterloo psychologist specializing in the perception of other minds, presented a series of empirical studies conducted to gauge the public perception of AI consciousness. In these tests, ChatGPT-4 is the constant used as AI. The results suggest that Hulme may actually be too generous in his timetable; 57-67% of those surveyed believe that ChatGPT is already conscious to some degree. Ok, so what? Does this mean that we must brace ourselves for a Matrix-like world? The computer scientist Roman Yampolskiy, author of Artificial Superintelligence: A Futuristic Approach, thinks so. Unlike today's cybersecurity, for example, where you can manually rectify a problem (e.g., banks issue a new credit card in cases of fraud), there will be no way out when a problem arises with conscious AI. Once it becomes conscious, it is already uncontrollable. The creation and implementation of conscious AI would then have to be perfect, which according to Yampolskiy is impossible. However, Yampolskiy would be the first to admit he is further down the doom-scale than most. Others are more hopeful; the philosopher and entrepreneur Dmitry Volkov, co-founder of the ICCS and CEO of Social Discovery Group (SDG), a global investment firm, believes the 2013 Spike Jonze film Her is a more apt prediction. This is why ten years later Volkov founded the girlfriend app Eva AI, an 'ideal AI partner who listens, and is always in touch with you.' The idea for Eva AI came out of data analysis from SDG, one of the first players in the online dating market. Many of the users were not always willing to meet but still desire communication. The Eva AI mission statement, according to Volkov: 'We are trying to solve the problem of loneliness from the other end, not from the Tinder attraction side.' This is where AI may be surprisingly effective. Volkov points out, 'when you disclose emotionally invaluable information with some other person, that has a real positive impact. But if you disclose it to humans or AI, it actually does not matter. "And we found early on [in our research] that emotional disclosure to AI has an even bigger positive impact. 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We are social beings, and for us, it is very important to be able to differentiate between the good and the bad.' On the other hand, he believes that 'philosophers actually created the problem of consciousness. Most people get it when they put enough effort, but it's not coming naturally.' Clark and the rest of the ICCS mainly focused on the metaphysical problems of defining and fine-tuning the concept of consciousness during their time in Crete. In a 1994 lecture, the Australian philosopher Dave Chalmers first articulated the hard problem of consciousness. This became the seminal 1995 paper 'Facing Up To The Hard Problem of Consciousness.' In very general terms, the hard problem questions the explanatory gap between the physical wiring and firing in the brain and the subjective experience of what it is like to be you. How can something purely physical (the body/brain) give way to something nonphysical (subjective experience)? 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There are some thinkers, such as English neuropsychologist Nick Humphrey, that have issues with the name 'illusionism' itself. But a key aspect of the theory is that the subjective experience central to realism still seems to exist. In other words, human consciousness is an illusion. Looking past these semantic disagreements, illusionism appears to be the leading view in the current philosophy of mind landscape. And yet the illusionists do not always see eye to eye. Unlike Volkov, the philosopher Katarina Marcincinova of the Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies in Slovakia was fearful of the possibility of AI (functional) consciousness, opining it will be 'highly dangerous and ethically problematic.' For example, she worries about counterfeit people pretending to be human. Still, Marcincinova believes the illusion of our consciousness is essential; it allows us to create a sense of purpose for life, the world, and ourselves. 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This observatory has maintained the world's longest continuous observation of atmospheric carbon dioxide and has been crucial to our understanding of how human-caused greenhouse gas emissions fuel global warming. NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML) in Miami, Florida, plays a vital role in operational hurricane forecasting. The lab develops cutting-edge tropical weather models that have significantly improved forecast accuracy in recent decades. National Hurricane Center (NHC) forecasters set a record for forecast track accuracy in 2024, according to a NOAA report. NHC issued 347 official forecasts during the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season, and its track predictions set accuracy records at every forecast time period. MORE: DOGE now has access to NOAA's IT systems; reviewing DEI program, sources say Who will lead NOAA next? 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