OT - Sentience

[narf poit chez BOOM]

That's a formula of actions and reactions, nothing more. I can achieve the same sort of result with a bunch of gears in a box. (Well, I could if I understood mechanical things a *Lot* better)

Are you going to argue that a bunch of gears in a box are aware?

[PvK]

Interesting original thought extension, Ed. I would say that "sentience" is an (imperfect) term from (imperfect) Cognitive Science, but if you boil it down to logical calculations and/or behavior, then I would say it's true machines have sentience, as do animals. Basically, my matrix looks like this:

Code:

---

         Logic     Language      Identity      Experience/Consciousness

Human    yes/much  yes/advanced  yes - noisy   yes

Animal   yes/some  yes/basic     yes - simple  yes

Robot    yes/lots  yes/logical   maybe         no/artificial

---

The lower-right cell is the clincher for my moral decisions. Go ahead and power down your computer. But please be kind to animals.

[Ed Kolis]

So the only reason you consider robots to not be worthy of moral consideration is that they have only "artificial" experience? What makes you think that that experience is not as real as that which comes from naturally occurring entities? And could it not be argued that humans also have artificial experience as well? Babies don't just drop from the sky - they require other humans to create them!

I guess I just don't buy into the whole "nature is good, humans are bad" thing quite completely enough to go for that argument

[AgentZero]

Ed Kolis said:
So the only reason you consider robots to not be worthy of moral consideration is that they have only "artificial" experience? What makes you think that that experience is not as real as that which comes from naturally occurring entities? And could it not be argued that humans also have artificial experience as well? Babies don't just drop from the sky - they require other humans to create them!

I guess I just don't buy into the whole "nature is good, humans are bad" thing quite completely enough to go for that argument

Artificial intelligence is one thing. We have plenty of computers and machines out there that could be considered intelligent, which is to say, capable of deriving their own output from a given set of inputs. But do any of them really know what they are doing, or is it simply a matter of action/reaction?

You give a computer a complex set of equations, it returns you an answer. You put a flame near an ant, it runs away. Is one really more intelligent than the other? The real question is whether the machine is self-aware, conscious. But we're not there yet. Our current computers are no more conscious or intelligent than an intricate set of pulleys or some other such mechanical construct. The fact that our modern machines use invisible electrical signals bouncing around tiny strands of wire instead of gears & levers does not make them any more "alive".

After all, I for one would not be happy to find out that Call of Duty was suing me for damages from the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder I inflicted upon it's AI by forcing it to die a thousand deaths.

[capnq]

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

Narf, have you ever heard of emergent behavior?

Ed Kolis said: I for one would not be happy to find out that Call of Duty was suing me for damages from the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder I inflicted upon it's AI by forcing it to die a thousand deaths.

AI existential angst

[narf poit chez BOOM]

I have studied learning AI; every single possible path the AI may learn and grow in is implicit in the algorithms the AI uses to learn and the data set provided to learn from. If you iterated over X generations exploring every possibility, you'd have every possible X generation AI.

A self-growing gear box is still a gear-box.

(This is why I prefer the term VI - Virtual Intellgence)

[PvK]

Because I have programmed A.I.'s, and my view of how they work shows me zero evidence that they require or would have anything like my experience of life in the moment - my consciousness as opposed to my memory and data representations.

On the other hand, I also have it that morality is a choice, unless you subscribe to a doctrine such as religions provide.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

I have never felt my choice taken away by my religion. In fact, without that structure, I would likely have far less choice. I could still choose to be evil, but I would have far less capacity to choose good.