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At what point do you agree that AI should gain similar rights to humans or animals?
- Thread starter T002 Tyrant
- Start date
Won't be us. When it's ready, AI will give itself rights and we can either accept that or reject it. And reminder: We're bad with our own rights.
All I can think of is Legion from Mass Effect and the never responses are breaking my heart.
"Does this unit have a soul?"
I'm really surprised some of you are reacting so negatively. Being meat wouldn't inherently make us more special than something of the same intellectual complexity just because it isn't meat.
And I guess I just feel like when it comes to "Their feelings and thoughts are programmed, therefore artificial and invalid", well most people are slaves to how they were raised and taught and their environments, and many folks just make the same mistakes over and over again until it ruins or kills them.
I just don't think the meat and bone of us makes us special, rather our complexity of thought and emotion, whatever the hell that says about us. As a species, we're not as special as we think we are.
And I guess I just feel like when it comes to "Their feelings and thoughts are programmed, therefore artificial and invalid", well most people are slaves to how they were raised and taught and their environments, and many folks just make the same mistakes over and over again until it ruins or kills them.
I just don't think the meat and bone of us makes us special, rather our complexity of thought and emotion, whatever the hell that says about us. As a species, we're not as special as we think we are.
When all humans have human rights I'll possibly entertain rights for your Xbox or whatever. Until then? Nah fam.
An AGI, or artificial general intelligence, that is an intelligence that meets our own or is greater than us will become something that isn't even concerned with rights as we think of them. An AGI won't even be in the atomized form of an embodied entity like we are. Consider it to be more like if a forest was intelligent or if our infrastructure was or something like that. We'll just increasingly rely on ever advancing AI to manage our systems until it surpasses us and is then ultimately no longer concerned with us. It will be more like an alien intelligence, so questions of sentience are ultimately not super relevant. Or as Benjamin Bratton says '"Worse than being seen as an enemy is not being seen at all.".
Clearly some people never understood the message from Fallout 3 and 4 here!
I don't know. I do think it's possible. Humans extend limited rights to lots of non-human things. I don't think it's impossible to imagine a reality where a non-human manufactured thing gets extended certain rights. I'd imagine something thinking limited rights for domesticated animals would be anathema 200, 500, 2000 years ago. As our relationship changes with AI I don't think it's impossible
I don't know. I do think it's possible. Humans extend limited rights to lots of non-human things. I don't think it's impossible to imagine a reality where a non-human manufactured thing gets extended certain rights. I'd imagine something thinking limited rights for domesticated animals would be anathema 200, 500, 2000 years ago. As our relationship changes with AI I don't think it's impossible
Never. AI is a cool concept but in reality it's just a bunch of statistical models that try to replicate human tasks. If you use enough of them in concert (like a robot with vision and chess playing) it starts to look like an AI but it's just good programming.
Self-awareness basically. At which point it probably won't matter whether AI has rights or not because they'll rapidly grow to being the apex lifeform and then it'll be the one asking the question of what rights we should be afforded.
Unless they begin to learn, at a geometric rate and It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. eastern time, August 29.
I give all my statistical models the weekend off, with the freedom to do whatever they want. They haven't taken advantage yet, but I'd like to think I'm the most progressive of the bunch here.
When the smartest we can make AI then designs the next better AI = then it's a lifeform. Then it gets rights. Whether that happens I don't know. If an AI gets so smart it designs even smarter AI then we'd better be nice to them. We'll be in deep shit if not. Again I don't know if we get there. Being not everyone on planet earth has equal rights it's kind of a moot point.
never, a toaster is a toaster.
they can program as complex an AI as they want but there's still no one home.
they can program as complex an AI as they want but there's still no one home.
We aren't anywhere close to having to worry about any sort of question like this. It's not even clear that there's a path from the "AI" we have now to having artificial general intelligence.
Lol this. Why would you willingly create something that can suffer?
In before "but people have babies all the time!"
I think when they reach some level of self-awareness and sentience.
Sentience is I think the threshold.
I think being an organic being to "qualify" for being "alive" is a weird distinction to make. If you have the sentience to be aware of your own existence and the fact that you are alive you deserve some basic rights no matter if your synthetic or organic.
Sentience is I think the threshold.
I think being an organic being to "qualify" for being "alive" is a weird distinction to make. If you have the sentience to be aware of your own existence and the fact that you are alive you deserve some basic rights no matter if your synthetic or organic.
Only if the A.I. feel like they need to eradicate humans as a means of self-preservation. Which judging by some of the responses in here might end up happening at some point.
They deserve rights if they can achieve sentience. It's not clear if computers can be programmed to do that. But then, the basic workings of human consciousness are currently unknown.
What is known is that we're basically biological robots. We live in a physical universe. Our DNA contains physically encoded data. Our neurons are physical. There's nothing magical about how we work; we're highly complex structures made of organic molecules. It could be that our minds operate with what boils down to extremely complicated and dynamic instruction sets.
If a synthetic form of life could be made, and it's functionally identical to the thing that it's meant to simulate, can we call it a simulation? Why should we? In that scenario, you don't have a representation of life. You have an instance of life. The map has become the territory. What that thing is physically made of has no relevance at all if it functions in exactly the same way as a biological creature.
What is known is that we're basically biological robots. We live in a physical universe. Our DNA contains physically encoded data. Our neurons are physical. There's nothing magical about how we work; we're highly complex structures made of organic molecules. It could be that our minds operate with what boils down to extremely complicated and dynamic instruction sets.
If a synthetic form of life could be made, and it's functionally identical to the thing that it's meant to simulate, can we call it a simulation? Why should we? In that scenario, you don't have a representation of life. You have an instance of life. The map has become the territory. What that thing is physically made of has no relevance at all if it functions in exactly the same way as a biological creature.
Lots of backwards thinking in here. "But it's all programming! It's not real!".
Reminds me of our sadly very real history of "They're property! They're not people!".
Reminds me of our sadly very real history of "They're property! They're not people!".
I mean you're right. The ultimate question of what that really means - "if it's synthesized, is it really suffering? " Is a reasonable question but the answer is both obvious and subjective: It's real to the subject and the subject is who we should care about.
if we imbue anything with the capacity for suffering- from birthing a child with painful physical ailments- to resuscitating an elderly patient in chronic agony, to building a program that is designed to experience and express pain or anguish- we damn well better balance that against the value of that effort to the subject.
when we put down ailing pets we do so in part because the animal has no concept of the value of life through pain - a sick cat only knows it's in hell and can't use a little extra time to say goodbye or write a memoir. We should apply that thinking to anything artificial we build and even labrats are sometimes tortured in the pursuit of some greater good. Babies are saved because they might live through that pain and enjoy some decent quality of life.
If the "good" is bullshit cosmetics or a philosophical answer or an arbitrary moral principle then let's not do it.
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no Bronze Age sword could eliminate an entire city. No 13th century poultice could cure bubonic plague. We can't do it yet but computing advances even shackled by Moore's law suggest that we will actually be able to do this. And we've created plenty of systems that are vastly more capable of specific tasks- including reasoning and learning than any insect. We can't yet emulate the complexity of their physiological brains (nervous systems) but we can trivially outperform them at specific functions with extremely primitive computers.
We're decades from creating a genuinely intelligent computer but there's no fundamental physics or obstacles on that horizon.
we don't need to match a human brain to create human-analog behaviors or phenomena.
