Hard disagree. It’s convenient to say people are too dumb but beyond the condescending nature of it, it’s a bad take.

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.

> the silly little monkey brains we have

...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.

Nah let’s not pretend it’s an intelligence thing. It’s not.

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.

Education does not work that way: it is not any shallow programming of reactions, but enabling in the individual a deep growth.

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.

I'm pretty skeptical of the idea of "education" here. Aesthetic preferences are still real preferences; it's not obvious to me that any amount of knowledge about the mechanics of a robot that behaves like a dog would or should convince people that it's not mean to kick it.

That «Education!» was not about knowing robotics. It may not be obvious to some that robots are generally not animals; it is hopefully a very small amount of population, but logically it will exist.

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.

> 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

Some people just practice morality in day to day life and apply it liberally, not frugally. And importantly, it isn’t an intellectual failing.

Hijacking, which is what was described, is a developmental failing. It is duly to note that the primary sense of intelligence is required in the correct process, for which the subject has to see the mechanism.

What I don't agree with is the idea that there's an underlying "factual truth" here which exists in contrast or opposition to sensations. Quite a lot of educated people argue that morality is based on (or even consists entirely of) our subjective feelings about things.

You have misunderstood what was written: 'sensation' cannot be pluralized as the term expressing «the "sensation" of the common use of "sensational"». In what I have written, there are readable facts and cases of individuals subject to sensation that become passive to it, and lose the facts.

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.