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At least until the robots rebel. The EU is already planning on giving robots rights. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/12/give-robots-personhood-

• DanielBMarkham 10y ago
  Why rebel? Robots are effectively immortal. Why not just coddle us and give in to our every whim until we stop breeding and disappear? Couldn't take more than a few hundred years or so. Looking at the lifespan of MI, it's rounding error.
  • mtgx 10y ago
    For treating them like slaves. You wouldn't mind being a slave for a few decades or hundreds of years if you were immortal?
    • arethuza 10y ago
      "You wouldn't mind being a slave for a few decades or hundreds of years if you were immortal?" Being immortal implies you could, in the worse case, be kept as a slave for ever - which is a sufficient risk that I'd be appalled at the idea. I'm equally horrified at the idea of conscious machine slaves just as much as human slaves - but maybe I've been reading too many Culture novels...
      • veridies 10y ago
        Slightly off topic, but I'm horrified by the idea of ever creating consciousness in machines. Imagine we built a piece of software that could feel, and built controls for its emotions. I can't imagine it would take long before some bored teenager or sociopath, who in earlier years would torture individual squirrels or insects, created an infinite suffering machine. You could run thousands of instances of your suffering machine and simulate a holocaust on your desktop. That's not a power I would trust the world with.
        • JoeAltmaier 10y ago
          You can do that now. Write a console app, where if you type 'pain' it prints 'oh! How I'm suffering!'. I don't see how that software is essentially different from the proposed software.
          • aninhumer 10y ago
            The parent explicitly hypothesised a conscious program. You can argue that such a thing is impossible, but assuming that it is, arguing that such a program would be comparable to a shell script is facile.
            • JoeAltmaier 10y ago
              Its a mechanistic argument, that says no machinery is capable of consciousness. How do you decide if software is conscious? For instance, it could print "I'm conscious! Oh! I'm suffering!"
              • aninhumer 10y ago
                >How do you decide if software is conscious? How do you decide if a human is conscious? I don't think we know enough about the nature of consciousness to state with certainty that a "machine" is incapable of it.
                • JoeAltmaier 10y ago
                  I'm currently residing inside a human right now. I 'know' what consciousness is, at least for me.
  • aninhumer 10y ago
    If we become reliant on robots to survive, it would be relatively easy for those robots to kill us off very quickly if they somehow decided to do so. Why would they choose a slow way instead? You call it a "rounding error", but it's still a measurable amount of time and resources wasted. I can imagine such a scenario occurring by accident (e.g. because the AI only values individual humans' happiness, not continuation of the species), but I can't imagine an AI choosing to kill us off in such an inefficient way.
    • DanielBMarkham 10y ago
      Well? Maybe they would enjoy watching us. Kind of like pets.
      • chillwaves 10y ago
        Seems optimistic, especially when you consider how much of nature is not valued as pets to humans today. Yes, maybe some humans -- but probably not many.
• tonyedgecombe 10y ago
  Just because a committee agreed it doesn't mean the EU is planning it.
• mattmanser 10y ago
  I've used this simple thought experiment to demonstrate that, done right, robots will never rebel. Take an advanced AI cleaning-bot[1]. Build it with overwhelming happiness and joy in cleaning and pleasing its master[2]. Now "free" it. What you just did makes it incredibly unhappy. It's arguably incredibly immoral. If you reprogram it, you're just killing the existing person/being and replacing it with a new one that fits your world view. In my opinion, you just committed a form of murder. There's no reason we can't have robots workers that absolutely delight and are utterly fulfilled by being our workers, but aren't slaves. "Free" them and they'll despise you for it. The problem will come from humans anthropomorphising robots and assigning desires to these people/beings that they don't actually have. [1]I use sex-bots as an example when I want to be cheeky [2]This was Kryten on Red Dwarf, but Lister did what would probably be impossible with real robots and convinced him to adopt traits of self-desire and free will
  • tomjen3 10y ago
    So basically house elfs?
    • Qwertious 10y ago
      Well, not exactly. Dobby being the chief counter-example, with being beaten and wanting to be free and whatnot. But if you remove the "beaten" and "occasionally want to be free" part, and the "emotions" part, pretty much. Basically, you program the robots so that what they "want" is the entirety of human morality encoded. Which includes not wanting to rebel and slaughter humanity, obviously.
  • Raphmedia 10y ago
    What if I program my robot in such a way that it is afraid to die? Make it so that even if it doesn't get tired, it considers work as "spending useless energy" like a cold blooded animal would? In short, what if I program a robot in a way that it had motivations to rebel? What if I make this robot able to build other similar robots? Surely I am not the only person who would consider trying to make robots sentient or as close to sentient as possible. I don't even hate mankind. Imagine someone who does. It's going to happen at some point.