I've been thinking for a while that use of AI in games might become a civil rights frontier in about 30 to 50 years or so

The open ended simulations, similar to earth conditions, might general enough to sprout some artificial general intelligence. Put multiple intelligences in a massive multiplayer online world and have them compete for shelter and resources. It's an environment that we know has produced intelligence.

It may be a brutal struggle, but perhaps that struggle is important. Perhaps having a simulated tree fall on you is more meaningful than being reaped by some objective function at the end of an epoch.

I think you’re on a potentially productive path, but it took 2 billion years of evolution in a staggeringly vast environment like that to produce results. The question is really how to shortcut that process, but training environments may well have a role to play.

Reverse engineering a human mind would be another approach.

This is often overlooked but it's the only approach that is pretty much guaranteed to succeed given enough time. That said, it's also likely that AGI will come about way earlier from another approach (just as planes came before the "robot birds").

While I agree this leads to haunting outcomes. e.g. If we create a successful interface then whats the point of building our own digital pastiches if we can just strap in the real thing?

Check out OpenWorm. They're trying to reverse engineer the simplest organism with a nervous system, a nematode with 302 neurons. They're making progress, but not very fast. That approach is going to be a long haul.

Ted Chiang wrote an interesting novella, The Lifecycle of Software Objects, about that very subject

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lifecycle_of_Software_Obje...

Another one is Crystal Nights by Greg Egan. Full text here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20090604111226/http://ttapress.c...

Or Iain Banks' take on the subject, in Surface Detail(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_Detail)

edit: wrong book ;)

> simulated evolution

Isn't that what genetic algorithms are?

yeah, one kind i guess. Or perhaps they cover all kinds?

well, "kill" becomes moot if the code is preserved. Like "killing" another player in a multi-player game. You're not actually killing them.

This may be a clunky analogy, but is this fundamentally different than a killing a human as long as we keep a record of their DNA sequence? Maintaining the information doesn't seem enough to negate snuffing out the execution of that information

The generic AI could be "playing" in a thousand virtual environments at once. Killing one of them doesn't really have a parallel in human life, or ethics.

I mean, yes, you killed a sentient being. But if that sentient being has a thousand concurrent lives, then what does "killing" one of those lives even mean? And if it can respawn another identical life in a millisecond, does it even count as killing?

I suspect that having sentient virtual entities will provide philosophy and ethics majors a lot of deep thinking room. As it already has for SciFi authors.

Would this opinion change if scientists were able to prove the multiverse theory where there are infinite numbers of "us" living concurrent lives as well?

Not if we persist the state of the mind before we turn them off. Can't do that with humans

yet