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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
by 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 agoFor 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 agoSlightly 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 agoYou 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 agoThe 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 agoIts 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 agoI'm currently residing inside a human right now. I 'know' what consciousness is, at least for me.
- aninhumer 10y agoIf 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 agoWell? Maybe they would enjoy watching us. Kind of like pets.
- chillwaves 10y agoSeems 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.