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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 c
by 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 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.