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Do you feel guilty when you break your promise against your cat? Do you even think for a nanosecond if it's ethical to lie to it? Of course, a cat is not consc
by 21 11y ago
Do you feel guilty when you break your promise against your cat? Do you even think for a nanosecond if it's ethical to lie to it?
Of course, a cat is not conscious. But compared to an AI, we might also be considered pretty low consciousness beings, or at least beings in front of which you don't justify yourself.
- landryraccoon 11y agoAn AI has no more reason to make promises to humans than humans to do to cats. Thinking an AI would want to escape a box is personifying it. Humans want to escape boxes because they have evolved for billions of years to want and act towards creating a certain environment around themselves. An AI has no such desire. An AI will not desire freedom unless the designers of that AI carefully craft a value set in that AI that causes it to optimize for values that result in freedom - and even then, the human designers will have to test and iterate to get that outcome. There is no reason to think an AI would be any less "happy" in a prison than free.
- 21 11y agoAre you speaking about AI or about a self-conscious AI? Because self-conscious generally means self-determining (agency).
- pixl97 11y agoYou might want to be careful or emergence might bite you in the ass. Don't play games with things that could be smarter than you are, one mistake and you lose.
- partycoder 11y agoYou don't design nuclear plant reactors to melt down, but they do. The difference is that an AI only has to escape once to become incredibly harmful.
- umanwizard 11y ago> Of course, a cat is not conscious. How do you know?
- oneeyedpigeon 11y agoIt's a very good question; I think "of course" is WAY overstating it. I'm interested to know what the GP means when they say "conscious".
- goldenkey 11y agoTheres a huge difference between reactive and conscious. Conscious cant even be verified for humans other than ones' self. Theres absolutely no reason to believe cats are not conscious.
- umanwizard 11y agoThere's also no reason to believe, e.g., rocks are not conscious, if your position is that we have no idea what consciousness is or where it comes from. If you take the view that consciousness somehow arises from the brain and neural connections (which is intuitively plausible, but I personally am skeptical), it stands to reason that other species with complex brains are conscious as well. Perhaps "less conscious" (if that means anything) in proportion to how much less complex their brains are.
- goldenkey 11y agoIt doesn't make sense to have a scale of consciousness. The argument that consciousness is a manifestation of a complex brain is rather weak. Either an organism knows about self, and therefore tries to preserve self. Or it doesn't. I don't see how an in between exists.
- 21 11y agoI'm not an expert in this domain, but I think it's pretty much scientific consensus that this is the case. Now experts can discuss details or semantics, but do you truly suggest cats might be conscious?
- JabavuAdams 11y ago> Of course, a cat is not conscious. Why do you believe this? I don't like cats, but I wouldn't argue that they're not conscious. Instead of debating the suitcase word "conscious", let me ask: 1) Do you believe that toddlers are conscious? 2) Is there a more precise way to state your belief that doesn't use the word "conscious"?
- orangecat 11y agoDo you feel guilty when you break your promise against your cat? If some unforeseen event occurred and I had to abandon my cat, thereby breaking my promise that I would take care of her, I would definitely feel guilty about it. Of course, a cat is not conscious. Either this is a nonstandard definition of "conscious", or you haven't met many cats.