That's quite scary to me personally.
It would be wise for /policymakers/ to pause and take this human reaction seriously... Education!... Lucidity in the population...
You are reminding of the reactions from a YT-type crowd, "Do not hurt the robot!"; nearby a member notes "is that the profile of a senior FAANG engineer?"... The elephant in the room is flashing: we must assess Natural Intelligence as a problem well before Artificial Intelligence!
Even people who absolutely are educated and know better - senior google AI researchers - are sympathetic.
People say thank you to Alexa even though no one is convinced Alexa is a person.
The issue isn’t lack of awareness that it isn’t a person, it’s the silly little monkey brains we have that tells us that anything that is like a person should be treated like one even if we know it’s not. It’s like people who look at faces in clouds. No one thinks the clouds are people.
...are those things that with a trained prefrontal become the wise respectable dignified brains some have. And they may come to different conclusions (they do).
Put it this way (to give your idea credit): the more intellectual sophistication there will be around, the less the suspect the one who treats scarecrows and mannequins «like a person ... even if we know it’s not», or thanks an 'address:port' type server for service, is confused.
Back to the point though: if one called sentient what is not out of being «sympathetic», there would be a factual mistake, which is not justifiable, and which has to be fought by training people to see things as they are. Mistakes have a very high social cost.
Saying thanks to Alexa even when you know she’s not a person is not a sign of (lack of) intelligence. It’s a sign of manners. Don’t pat yourself on the back and say you’re intelligent because you express good manners less often than the next person.
While I think it’s a bit silly that the researcher thought the chat bot was sentient, I don’t think it’s silly that the bot is perceived sufficiently human to be worth of manners if Alexa has been there for almost a decade.
I don’t think we should teach people that bots are explicitly not worth a level of manners even at the cost of a strange life-like sympathy some may develop. It took us hundreds of years to teach people that human slavery was wrong and we should treat actual people with respect - and many are still pretty bad at it. Frankly society needs all the practice it can get.
Society makes a ton of “factual mistakes”. Look at all of religion, most of politics, a huge amount of history books, much of lower-grade science education. It’s all full of “factual mistakes” that, today, probably have higher social costs than someone being nice to a robot.
What would “training” even look like? Mandatory bot-sympathizing “reeducation” classes in elementary school? We couldn’t even teach people vaccines were safe and worth getting during a pandemic, but we’re going to trying to tell people not be be nice to human-like things? I can’t imagine how high the social costs to that will be.
That depth is absolutely crucial in a society.
And your examples are staggeringly tied with contexts in which superficiality is the crucial factor for not seeing the matter nor the issues around the matter.
It is more possible that some people know that the robot is not an animal, but the perceptual patterns cause a sensational reaction in them, and they may prefer the sensation - an hijacking - to the factual truth (which includes that what superficially corresponded to patterns in the area of "«mean»" are engineering tests on implemented balance systems), overriding it. Some may not even have had to consider sensation (of course, the "sensation" of the common use of "sensational") topically, or may encourage it on a spontaneous value given to "feeling". There, instead, education leads.
Then, again, there will be those that will make a statement of their «aesthetic preferences» as a demand, and not realize that they are personal, subjective, and that to be presented in the common arena grounds, good arguments are required.
Education is a system to refine the mind to sophistication, which has the collective benefit of reducing noise. Which makes it a social concern. Which should get a priority proportional to what the news reveal.
Some people just practice morality in day to day life and apply it liberally, not frugally. And importantly, it isn’t an intellectual failing.
Your «subjective feelings» are not a "good savage": they have their development, and they are integrated part of the whole inner system, in-development, in-refinement. And in fact, I was promoting education, which develops and refines you.
If only Google hadn't fired the AI ethicists who were actually competent enough to try to explain this part of it.
https://twitter.com/mmitchell_ai/status/1535775360901451776
Well, that's less exciting than "we got sentience!" and less profitable than "robot friends waiting now, only 99c/min", so here we are.
Or maybe a couple people made comments like that for humor, and the rest were repost bots, trained on their comments. Let's not speculate about their internal motivation, it'll get recursive.
So you want introduce laws and regulations that stifle innovation in order to prevent inefficient bureaucracies that stifle innovation?
Not making it exactly human/animal like won't help that much, the underlying features that make the bot useful such as graceful moment, well enunciated speech or deep conversation will make it feel more human like no matter what form they take.
The point is that if a chatbot gets sophisticated enough to say these things we can't dismiss them out of hand due to things like logical inconsistencies. Humans have tons of those. It's not a large leap to assume approximating consciousness with so little would have similar bugs and shortcuts. I think if the chatbot is asking you to be nice you should re-evaluate why you're being a dick to a piece of software and not trying to prove that it ultimately doesn't matter because the thing isn't a person. Same goes for kicking the Boston Dynamics robot. Your drywall isn't even sonething people anthropomorphize, but punch holes in it and you'll see how their perception of you changes.
How we treat objects bleeds into how we treat one another. Indeed, some of us were and are still considered property.
Your spell/grammar checker is not offended at your cuss words even if it flags them as not recommended. The Boston Dynamics dog took the kick as input to its dynamic stability algorithm, and instantly forgot it without a trace.
What people think about you for punching the wall has absolutely nothing to do with the wall, and everything to do with your character.
If your chatbot regurgitates a request to be nice, that means exactly as much as your Magic 8 Ball saying "Answer cloudy, ask again later."
This is spot on. The danger is not from the AI themselves. The danger is from people’s reactions to the AI’s.
I remember seeing a Boston Dynamics video years ago where they kicked their robot to test stability. The video was littered with comments sympathizing with the robot because it moves in a lifelike way, “Stop being so mean! You’re hurting it!”
The capability to imitate intelligence is only going to grow, and along with it the percentage of the population that believes they are conscious.
It would be wise for technologists to pause and take this human reaction seriously.