OT - Sentience

[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.