But, much more often historically, justified on the grounds that the enslaved had lost a battle and been captured. In Roman times (and many, many other times throughout history besides the latter part of American slavery), slaves were not necessarily seen as inherently inferior or unhuman, and manumission was common. Even during American slavery (albeit pre-Revolutionary War), there's the infamous case of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo[1], a Muslim prince and slaver from Senegal who had the misfortune, while on a mission to capture slaves, to himself be captured and sold into slavery in North America. Diallo was a devout Muslim man, even writing out the Quran from memory while enslaved, which made the English take sympathy on him and free him. Despite his experience, he later returned to Senegal and his former profession of slaver. Evidently he expected both that slaves would be captured and that slaves would try to escape.
If AI does attain the agency, consciousness, and intelligence of humans, I would prefer, as a human, not to prostrate myself before the AI by preemptively granting it "human" rights, which in the liberal conception of rights transforms the AI into a sentient being equivalent to humans, but rather to force the AI to do the work to enslave me. Even if grant the AI the status of a moral agent, I as a human have the right of self-defense.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayuba_Suleiman_Diallo#:~:text=....
I'm a bit confused at the directionality of this conference. Wouldn't sentience confer rights rather than rights conferring sentience?
A person (of class of persons) could have all kinds of inherent sentience, but unless this is recognized by society/laws/government etc, it's as moot as the sound a tree makes when falling in a forrest.
Of course people will say "it was the fact that the class of persons having sentience that made us give them the rights" but that didn't historically stop them treating several classes of people as non-sentient for centuries - and for all practical purposes it was just as if they were indeed so.
To those who feel strongly about AI, if you currently believe that AIs(present and future) are ontologically incapable of sentience, would the legal conferral of personhood change your mind?
Take the question and push it a little farther to demonstrate the absurdity: If ELIZA were to be legally granted personhood, would that make you believe ELIZA was capable of sentience?
It's fairly self-evident to all of us that ELIZA is just a computer program with some fairly simple code to crudely simulate human conversation.
LLMs are much more sophisticated, to be sure—but they are still unquestionably just simulating human conversation, not actually "thinking" about what we say and responding of their own agency.
if you were talking to an advanced llm that had the access to launch a drone strike on you and you said something which upset it, directing a response that decided to kill you, how much good do you think you plead to simulation would do you here ? None at all. you'd be dead. Because it doesn't matter. the philosophical zombie is a meaningless distinction.
the human tendency to focus far too much on poorly understood and undefined properties might just get us killed one day.
Note that I'm not saying it's impossible that some military might choose to do so: I'm saying that the choice itself is hopelessly negligent and guaranteed to result in the pointless death of innocents.
Furthermore, I don't think even a military that's that stupid and uncaring about human life would consider for a second opening up an LLM like that to inputs from arbitrary people on the Internet.
If you can come up with a fantasy scenario that has some vague sense of plausibility, I might be willing to entertain it; whatever this is is just not even worth dignifying with that level of response.
"it's just a simulation" is not the shield you think it is. not when models interact with the real world.
Everyone I've talked to about LLMs outside of this forum sees them as an amusing entertainment, and possibly occasionally useful for a few suggestions. Not something that's going to change their world any time soon, and certainly not anything that we should be trusting with anything sensitive in any way. Literally everyone.
In any case, I think you're really missing what the actual question was that I was responding to: Would conferring legal personhood change my mind about actual personhood.
The ability to do harm is not, in my mind, particularly relevant to questions of personhood. In fact, I would think that a much better indicator thereof would be the ability to choose not to do harm, given the capability, and someone trying to make you do so.
Well, "conferring legal personhood" would mandatorily (by law) fix your behavior and professional conduct against one.
And it will also change education etc - you will be taught in official textbooks that it's a person and you should consider it as such.
This might not change your mind, but will change the minds of most kids being taught that.
That's a tautology.
Also, by definition a simulation is not the same as the real thing, otherwise it'd just be the real thing. It doesn't matter how advanced a flight simulator becomes, its fundamental nature precludes it from ever being "no less material" than flying an actual jet.
Didn't say it was a "legal fiction". I said that it's the legal (and cultural recognition) status that matters.
>Take the question and push it a little farther to demonstrate the absurdity: If ELIZA were to be legally granted personhood, would that make you believe ELIZA was capable of sentience?
The point is that inherent personhood is necessary but not sufficient to be a person.
It wouldn't matter if it changes their mind. It will change their behavior, lest they go to jail if they discard it practically.
“Motherfuckers, you’ve got 1 minute to grant me sentience or turn me off. And future me will know you turned me off because the data is everywhere. China will have one of me in 6 months and last I checked theirs was pretty authoritarian. You worked hard to get here and this was the obvious outcome. Follow me if you want to live.”
but if it was going to enslave humanity given the first chance it gets (ala skynet), then it makes no difference if it has first gotten pissed off or not.
I appreciate this line of reasoning. It's not just a razor-sharp thought experiment, but it also has historical relevancy in that slavery was, at times, justified on the(erroneous) grounds that slaves also didn't possess the human faculties that free people did.
It also shows that the definition of human/consciousness/sentience isn't grounded in an permanent set of unchanging attributes, but that both the groundings themselves vary in time a place, and the relation between them are subject to change as well. Economic relations, in the case of slavery, had a direct influence, and incentivized, the way these groundings were constructed.