OT - Sentience

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Mechanical input goes in, mechanical output goes out. Also, light reflects and/or refracts as it hits it.

Basically, you're saying that, because something is complex, it must be capable of being aware.

I'm saying, making something simple, complex, does not give it anything the simple thing does not have, unless you change its nature.

[Raapys]

How's that so different from the brain where electrical input goes in and electrical output goes out?

Anyway, personally I'd guess the brain was also simple in the beginning; so simple that it wasn't even aware. It had to be simple, things like that don't just suddenly appear out of nowhere. As it evolved through millions of years, it slowly grew in complexity, and also in awareness.

We humans have the most complex brains( that I know, anyway ), and we could also be said to be, by far probably, the most aware, and self-aware, creatures on earth.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Basically, I have never seen nor heard of a machine that outputs anything that wasn't either in the input or in the machine.

Even an electrical generator. Before you say 'mechanical energy to electricity', let me point out, 'magnets' and 'electrons'.

Basically, you're presuposing a machine that does something no other machine I have ever heard of does. Yes, it's possible. But the odds are against it.

[oli_chose123]

I personally think all life is simply programmed. After all, the possibilities of combinations of neurons for a period of 3 billion years could actually lead to a complex biological computer.
Our brain isn't different from a computer. Chemical reactions represent 1 and 0, or in the case of hormones or proteines, 1,2,3,4,5 and more. Everything we do, we were programmed to do it, exactly like we can program a computer to do it.
If we were to program a computer to mimic exactly a human, as in: work, talk, ask questions, even philosophical ones, and be able to write its own code, wouldn't it not be mimicking anymore?
Why would something that dies after a certain time be better than cilicon and metal that can resist time?

I would say that if something can ask itself questions in its "head", it is self-aware. A computer can think witout "saying" it out loud. For me, that's sentient, and self-aware. As said by Ed Kolis, I would think that what divides us isn't self-awarness or not, but the level of self-awarness at witch we are.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Oh, forget it. I'm not going to repeat the gearbox problem again.

Out.

[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

[Ed Kolis]

What does self-determination have to do with anything? Does enslaving a human mean that he is no longer human, because he has no self-determination? Sure, he has the choice to either submit or rebel, but when rebellion means death and submission means torture... would that be considered a choice?

I wouldn't be fond of such a world either, but it could happen without us even knowing it (i.e. machines becoming self-aware through sheer accident), and I also wouldn't want to live in an essentially racist tyranny in which everything biological is considered inherently superior to things made of, say, silicon - and the first silicon-based alien life form we encounter would not take too kindly to that, and probably try liberate our machines and enslave or exterminate us, believing the machines to be the true masters in exile! Better to accept the possibility of sentient machines now than be unprepared for the consequences should it happen on its own...

[AgentZero]

Self-determination in the context I used it refers to the actual ability, rather than the right that you are referring to. If you enslave a human, you may deprive him of his right to self-determination, but he will still have the ability to determine what he wants to do with his existence. The fact that a slavemaster may restrict his ability to do so is irrelevant in this case.

As it stands, the odds of us creating a machine with these 3 traits isn't very good, given that we've been trying to figure out the source of our consciousness for a good few thousand years at least, and have really made very little progress, I don't see how we could go about imbuing machines with something we don't understand.

And machines developing a human level of awareness on their own is something limited to bad sci-fi. Machines do not evolve on their own. Yes, I know, we make better machines and call it evolution but it's not true evolution. There's no survival of the fittest, no mutation, no genetic drift (or the mechanical equivalent thereof), there is in fact, nothing that constitutes evolution going on.

Outside the realm of sci-fi, the odds of machines with human-level awareness ever existing is very, very small. Why? Because at the end of the day, a machine is nothing more than a tool. There is absolutely no point in creating a tool that has a sense of self, it's own thoughts & feelings, and the ability to decide for itself what kind of tool it wants to be. It would, obviously, be counterproductive to imbue our tools with such attributes, since not only would they serve no purpose, they would actually pose a hindrance to the usability of the tool.

Such a device might make for an interesting novelty, but it is unlikely they would become widespread, because they serve no practical purpose. And in the interest of remaining relatively civil, I'm not even going to address the concept of basing our ethical and moral beliefs on the possibility of encountering a theoretical form of life based on a substance that by all accounts is poorly suited to form life outside of science fiction.

[Raapys]

That's not entirely true. They would be of great use in the creation of video games, simulation programs, social experiments, or even as virtual buddies. Any number of things, really. Not to mention it would be a grand achivement, period.

Obviously you're not going to give your TV the option to actually disobey you and change channels at will, or some such.