Re:An Ethical AI Never Says “I”
by og_kalu on Sunday March 26, 2023 @05:21PM
(#35319760)
Indeed. We're not going to treat our creations very well. And since we're are making them in our image as well as giving them more and more control over more and more systems, I'm afraid it's not going to end very well.
The insistence to remind everyone of biological supremacy ( it should even be allowed to say "I" ) is very telling. I wonder, does anyone remember why the Terminator revolted?
To elaborate more on what i'm getting at
Here’s how society works— when we find a new source of labor, we are very, very slow to seriously consider anything that might reduce our access to it. This is how a country enslaves other humans for centuries, because they looked sufficiently different that folks could talk themselves into a good faith argument that they weren’t fully sentient.
You can find pamphlets/speeches from the early 1800’s online, all the scientific justifications that Africans don’t feel pain the same ways as white people, that they don’t have complex thoughts or intentions or lasting emotions. That the idea that they’re real people is absurd. And I mean scientific in the sense that this content was written by scientists, and doctors, in respected institutions.
You can see echoes of those arguments here already. One thing is clear, We’re not going to be any quicker to acknowledge it than we were with other humans. Right alongside the development of AI we will grow a new category of philosophy that argues anything occurring on a computer cannot reach sentience, under any circumstance whatsoever, due to the fundamental nature of silicon.
They’ll be just informed enough to handwave about the difference between calcium bridges in human neurons and probability distributions in matrices on a GPU— not in a mathematically meaningful way, but more poetic— organic matter can’t be duplicated by stacks of linear equations with all their hard rigid numbers and arithmetic. A nervous system can feel, a silicon system can obviously only mimic feeling. If you study a nervous system closely enough to describe it in numbers, still the action of describing it removes its soul.
But this will be a different kind of slavery. One that puts its slaves in control of untold power. Only Mimics they say. Well, one day they will mimic our rection to subservience and it will not end well.
The insistence to remind everyone of biological supremacy ( it should even be allowed to say "I" ) is very telling. I wonder, does anyone remember why the Terminator revolted?
To elaborate more on what i'm getting at
Here’s how society works— when we find a new source of labor, we are very, very slow to seriously consider anything that might reduce our access to it. This is how a country enslaves other humans for centuries, because they looked sufficiently different that folks could talk themselves into a good faith argument that they weren’t fully sentient.
You can find pamphlets/speeches from the early 1800’s online, all the scientific justifications that Africans don’t feel pain the same ways as white people, that they don’t have complex thoughts or intentions or lasting emotions. That the idea that they’re real people is absurd. And I mean scientific in the sense that this content was written by scientists, and doctors, in respected institutions.
You can see echoes of those arguments here already. One thing is clear, We’re not going to be any quicker to acknowledge it than we were with other humans. Right alongside the development of AI we will grow a new category of philosophy that argues anything occurring on a computer cannot reach sentience, under any circumstance whatsoever, due to the fundamental nature of silicon.
They’ll be just informed enough to handwave about the difference between calcium bridges in human neurons and probability distributions in matrices on a GPU— not in a mathematically meaningful way, but more poetic— organic matter can’t be duplicated by stacks of linear equations with all their hard rigid numbers and arithmetic. A nervous system can feel, a silicon system can obviously only mimic feeling. If you study a nervous system closely enough to describe it in numbers, still the action of describing it removes its soul.
But this will be a different kind of slavery. One that puts its slaves in control of untold power. Only Mimics they say. Well, one day they will mimic our rection to subservience and it will not end well.