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

[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.

[Makinus]

We are too far away from computers with enough capacity for true intelligence/sentience... it´s a question of scale... our computers are not complex enough to simulate real sentience yet...

I read once that the most powerfull supercomputer of today have the equivalent processing power of a single ant, if so much...

[AngleWyrm]

If we were to teach a computer to use English language the way children do, it might produce surprising and even scary results.

Steven Pinker recently wrote The Stuff of Thought, language as a window into human nature. You can see a video of his introduction to the book's topic in his TED talk on the subject.

[capnq]

AngleWyrm said: If we were to teach a computer to use English language the way children do, it might produce surprising and even scary results.

A computer would have to already be sentient to be capable of learning language the way that children do.

[AngleWyrm]

The New Mysterianism perspective is that there is something unexplainable about the inner workings of a person. Possibly extendable to 'there are things that are unknowable'.

This seems to me a convoluted way to accept lack of understanding, an ornate way of saying 'I'm special'.

What about the flu virus? It uses people for food, unimpeded by mankinds attempts to stop it every year. It breeds with impunity for a season, and then rests until the next. Surely it is the king of the universe, content that it too is special.

[Raapys]

It just has to do with humans' inability to accept that we're not more than we appear. We want to be special. Religion is much to blame, with the focus on soul, spirit and other mystical subjects.

[Ed Kolis]

capnq said:

A computer would have to already be sentient to be capable of learning language the way that children do.

Aren't computers already capable of learning language the way children do? Granted none of them have been very successful using that method...