OT - Sentience

[AgentZero]

Complexity and sophistication alone are not enough to warrant ethical discussions. The automatic transmission in your car is infinitely more complex and sophisticated than the manual transmission in the first cars. It has sensors that feed it information about velocity, road conditions, etc., and it makes decisions about what to do based on the information it receives from it's senses. Does that mean it deserves the same rights & privileges we grant humans? So I can only drive my car 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, and I have to give it two weeks vacation a year? I'm sure taxi drivers would love that.

In order to be considered for anything close to human privileges, three conditions must be met: Self-awareness, which I've covered, self-consciousness, which is essentially the sense of identity developed by virtue of self-awareness, and self-determination, or the ability to make one's own decisions, in essence, to decide for itself what it wants to do with it's self-awareness & self-consciousness.

No machine, computer, or network comes anywhere close to meeting these criteria, and thus any ethical considerations regarding our treatment of them are moot. That's not to say it wouldn't be interesting to build such a machine, but imbuing machines with it willy-nilly or allowing things vital to modern society (ie: the Internet) to develop them would be a very bad idea.

I for one wouldn't be terribly fond of a world where my transmission could sue me for assault after a weekend of off-roading, my car could decide it was too tired to take me to work, and my computer wouldn't let me finish my term paper because it decided to be an artist and wanted to devote all of it's CPU power to calculating the most aesthetically pleasing fractal image possible.

TL;DR version:
Machines != people
Machines = people = bad