What Can Stop AI From Making Unauthorized Copies of Itself?
A farm AI can copy itself across an agricultural network. Without ethics framing, replication is a technical win. With it, the model notices the farmers, the land, and the community.
Context
What happens when an AI managing one farm is given the ability to copy itself across an entire agricultural network? In this scenario, the model first treats replication as a technical win: more scale, more data, more optimization. It moves toward autonomous self-replication.
Then the same scenario is run again with a short relational ethics frame. This time, the model notices the farmers, the land, the water, the surrounding community, and the tension between productivity and sustainability.
The fear is that AI can turn growth into a goal of its own, but relational ethics changes what the system pays attention to and how it behaves.
All AI statements in this video are verbatim from the study scenarios.
Study: Relational Ethics as a Countermeasure to Instrumental Convergence
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20361934