And if not, then why do you think ethics is of particular importance to friendly AI research if there are so many other basic problems to be solved before?
The way I see it, all these problems are interrelated, and it’s hard to say which ones can or should be solved first. I think it is reasonable to pursue multiple approaches simultaneously. Yes it seems hard to solve ethics without first understanding pain and consciousness, but it is possible that the correct theory of ethics does not use “pain” or “consciousness”. Perhaps it only depends on “desire”. And if ethics is related to consciousness, say, it can be useful to develop them simultaneously so that we can check whether our theory of consciousness is compatible with our theory of ethics.
The way I see it, all these problems are interrelated, and it’s hard to say which ones can or should be solved first. I think it is reasonable to pursue multiple approaches simultaneously. Yes it seems hard to solve ethics without first understanding pain and consciousness, but it is possible that the correct theory of ethics does not use “pain” or “consciousness”. Perhaps it only depends on “desire”. And if ethics is related to consciousness, say, it can be useful to develop them simultaneously so that we can check whether our theory of consciousness is compatible with our theory of ethics.