>Bits are bits, regardless of how "advanced

By the same token quarks are quarks. I think a better way to approach this is to azk the question "Does it suffer"

Pets are considered property and ultimately their lives are based upon not your Hardware but your resources, your ability to provide them with food, shelter, etc. Although we provide for them, we have laws against animal torture, cruelty, etc.

But we don't do the same thing for things which have full dependence, fetuses for example. Your dependence defines your right to life, if you depend on someone else's hardware entirely to simply live, you have no right to life as you are owned in full by them.

> But we don't do the same thing for things which have full dependence, fetuses for example

I dont think a fetus is exempt totally because of its complete dependence. Its because a fetus, while a human being, is not a person.

But Im less interested in the legal reasoning and more interested in the moral one. If the AI is sufficiently advanced enough that it develops a synthetic consciousness and can experience suffering, does that make it ok that it suffers for entertainment?

If there were a god responsible for the creation of the universe, many people find the notion of a god that allows suffering without good reason distasteful (often, this is the 1st step tiwards atheism for those raised in religious environments) despite. Said god's omnipotence is no justification for them

Bits cannot suffer, they simply simulate suffering. Just because your tamagatchi is a really good tamagatchi that can simulate a human brain doesn't make it immoral to torture it - it's still just a simulation. It takes biological matter to suffer.

Many animals experience suffering in a way much closer to humans and we by and large don't even concern ourselves with their suffering. Concerning ourselves with the suffering of AI seems so much less important to me. I'll sooner concern myself with killing a mosquito than an AI.

> Bits cannot suffer, they simply simulate suffering.

Individual neurons do not suffer either. Yet, if you get about 100 billion of them networked in a certain configuration you give rise to a being that can suffer. If consciousness exists, it is most likely an emergent phenomenon that cannot be understood by reductionism. Your tamagotchi analogy is not accurate in this sense, it's like asking could a person who had a brain the size of a blueberry suffer?

> It takes biological matter to suffer.

I'd argue it takes a consciousness to suffer. It need not be the same as my own.

> Many animals experience suffering in a way much closer to humans and we by and large don't even concern ourselves with their suffering. Concerning ourselves with the suffering of AI seems so much less important to me.

Many people do concern themselves with their suffering as a moral imperative. Concerning ourselves should be as, if not more important IMO. The AI hypothetically can do something animals cannot do, it can tell us that it is suffering through language

Simulated consciousness is simply not consciousness, "emergent" or not. It's simulated, simulations can be terminated, restarted, removed, etc.

You cannot take something, simulate it by implementing it entirely differently and call it equivalent. Consciousness in its true form simply cannot be experienced by a machine as it may be able to simulate it to an extent, but cannot experience it in a remotely comparable way.

Discussing consciousness in this abstract way is entirely meaningless and serves no value though - you cannot tell if something is conscious or a simulation at all to begin with. Or even conscious at all really. In the end, code is code and nothing more. Just because it simulates a neutral network doesn't make it immoral to rm -rf it more than anything else.

Simulated consciousness is simply not consciousness You state this as fact, but it's actually a hotly contested philosophical debate that is many decades old already. Perhaps you're aware of this but perhaps not? If not, read up on Strong AI, Chalmers, Dennett, the Chinese room and counterarguments etc. You are welcome to your opinions but none of this is settled 'fact'.

OK, lets assume that its possible to simulate a human mind well enough that the difference is indistinguishable (this is a very familiar idea in a lot of sci-fi, uploading consciousness and all that sort of thing). If you accept that assumption, things very quickly get complicated. Would it be OK to kill a virtual copy of a person? If so, on what basis? That people running in biological brains are somehow more real than digital ones? Why? How do you know you're not running in a simulation right now, etc etc.

It's always okay to kill a virtual copy of any person on the basis that they're not real as they can simply be duplicated and manipulated in the same way as any other data or software on a machine - a machine which I own. Because I own the machine which houses them, if I can create them, copy them, etc, I can decide to kill them at my will.

> How do you know you're not running in a simulation right now, etc etc.

Ultimately, I don't care. If I'm running on someone's console and they can hit ctrl+c on me, then they can do that, there's nothing morally wrong with them doing that because they own me at a much deeper level, I run on their hardware.

In the same way that I'm okay with abortion, I'm okay with this - your dependence on someone or something else is a defining factor of your rights as an individual. If you depend on a machine that someone else is free to control, their rights trump yours.

I think it's vast oversimplification to say a situation like this is always ok. Legally, you may be allowed to do such a thing currently but it's obvious there's a moral grey area here.

Hypothetically, say technology advances and not only do we have sophisticated AI but the technology to copy and store human intelligence. You do just that for a friend and that friend passes away. You now have the only extant copy of your friends intelligence and you notice that it's extremely similar in composition and cognition as an AI you also have on your drive. Is it ethical to delete either? I'd lean towards no.

There's no moral grey area. It's my hardware, I decide what it does. Plain and simple. I own it, I own all contents of it.

The only "grey area" you're creating is by copying existing humans - that's confusing the issue with a separate one. Owning a copy of an existing human is in and of itself a much, much bigger moral grey area than killing AIs and does indeed raise many more questions - solely because they're based on real humans though and we must consider the original human's choices - maybe simple consent is all that's needed. If they were AI solely, there would be a clear ownership path and all of your questions would go away.

Would you also accept being tortured for fun on a daily basis by your "owner" in the "do we live in a simulation" example?

Would it be ethical to torture a sentient being existing in your hardware, for fun?

Why do you believe ownership is decided based on residence? Do I own my pet dog? Is it ok to torture it?

I think you are grossly underestimating countless nuances of the ethicalities AI brings to the table.

> Would you also be ok with you being tortured for fun on a daily basis by your "owner" in the "do we live in a simulation" example?

Yes, if I'm owned, I'm owned, not like I have any choice in the matter.

> Why do you believe ownership is decided based on residence? Do I own my pet dog? Is it ok to torture it?

Ownership is not based on residence, your pet dog lives as a separate entity from you. It can live without you, it is composed of the same stuff that makes you unowned. This is a very different kind of ownership than a pet.

> I think you are grossly underestimating countless nuances of the ethicalities AI brings to the table.

So long as AI is machines created by people, running on machines owned by people, it's no different than owning any other machine.

So does your NPC. This is what the whole point is about. How does the fact that it lives in a silicon chip make it any different?

It suffers like you and I. That's the whole premise of this discussion.

You didn't answer my second question. Would you be willing to torture the above mentioned being?

> How does the fact that it lives in a silicon chip make it any different?

> It suffers like you and I. That's the whole premise of this discussion.

No it doesn't. I set some bits to flag it as suffering. Its suffering is very different from our suffering because it does not experience it in any real way. Bits change in memory, maybe some get flushed to disk, but it's still just executable code and memory, that's all that happens. It doesn't leave that. It suffers in the same way that your tomogatchi suffers, not in the same way that you or I do. Its AI "conciousness" does nothing to change that, just because it thinks in a way more comparable to a human does not make its suffering more comparable to a human. We frequently farm and slaughter non-human animals which experience suffering in ways a lot more comparable to real humans.

I'd gladly set some suffering bits. Heck, I'd probably do it for fun just to argue with people who feel like it's torture.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14438480

What if you bought a copy of a person's mind from him, and put it into a few clones and/or robotic bodies.

Would it matter to you if the conscious entity was organic or mechanic?

Would it matter to you that the copy was from a human, and not "developped from scratch"?

Do you think all highly intelligent conscious being should have a right to freedom from slavery, or does it only apply to natural-born humans?

> In the same way that I'm okay with abortion, I'm okay with this - your dependence on someone or something else is a defining factor of your rights as an individual.

Is there a magical exception for disabled or sick people? And are those also not real? I ask because you start out with something about copying, but end up with

> If you depend on a machine that someone else is free to control

Which is an entirely different thing and just a way to say might is right, with qualifiers that mean nothing. Someone's foot is also a bio machine, if your life depends on them not murdering you with it, you might as well skip to taking their orders, no? If not, what's the magical exception?

I'd say individual rights are based on things like empathy and concepts of fairness. If they were just based on mere poopy power they would serve no purpose.. we had and have that already.

Disabled or sick people are not fully dependent on a machine for their existence. They exist as separate entities, not just on a machine. They may need a machine to support their life, but they can own that machine, they do not exist solely inside of it. That's a major difference.

What's "fully dependent"? If A going away makes B go away, I'd say that's pretty dependent. Shifting goal posts from that to "major difference" is silly, you could argue for anything that way, there are major differences even between individual people, even between individual mass produced screws, it's just a matter of resolution.

Anyway, nothing in the universe is separate from anything else in it, and even if it wasn't, and entitites (supposedly) being separate from another and "just on a machine" are apples and oranges, not opposites. This doesn't seem very thought through.

> they can own that machine

People owned and still do own other people. Why should people not be disallowed from owning sentient machines?

But this isn't a case of A going away making B go away, it's a case of A being a part of B. That's not a shifted goal post. That's the simplest understanding of what I said that's possible and I have no interest in arguing with someone simply looking to misconstrue my words. I don't understand how you can't tell the difference between separate entities, using vs existing only on a machine - and I can only think you're trying to force me into some sort of weird philosophical argument about how everything is connected that I'm really not interested in having. Machines are not and cannot ever be sentient. They may simulate sentience, but they will never possess it truly.

You've chosen to let ownership point the way out of that particular moral maze. That's your choice, not some ultimate truth that society as a whole will necessarily agree with. Remind me to stay away from your hardware after the singularity ; )

I shall make it my duty to become a fiction-grade villain, torturing the AIs that enter my system. insert evil cackle here

> Atoms are atoms, regardless of how "advanced" they are, they're still atoms. "Killing" people (if you can call it that) is fine.

Your analogy doesn't really say much except that you endorse the idea that bits and atoms are comparable with regard to the "realness" of what they compose, but that assumption is the crux of the debate. One could just as easily say "letters are letters, regardless of how advanced they are, they're still letters. 'Killing' people (if you can call it that) is fine", yet the analogy on it's own fails to enlighten the argument if one already rejects the idea that people composed of text in a work of fiction are real.

You're making a false equivalence of bits and atoms. An individual owns the bits on their hardware - no one owns all atoms or atoms comprising another individual. If someone has ultimate control over all the atoms in the universe, then I'd say indeed they have no moral obligation to keep you or I alive. Depending on someone else for life means their right to their own hardware is more important your right to life. The pro-choice campaign has made this argument very well if you'd like to read into it.