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I would argue that morality is not simply a philosophical matter, but also a strategy for a society to survive, that's why it changes with the technology. For i

by chr1 8y ago

I would argue that morality is not simply a philosophical matter, but also a strategy for a society to survive, that's why it changes with the technology. For instance strategy that was necessary and normal for hunter-gatherers: kill weak or extra children for whom tribe didn't have resources, seems horrible now when as a society we have resources to keep them all. In the case when child is truly incapable to exist without the mother, (before it is born), even most of the modern thinking allows to end it. But i think this will change when we have technology to grow people from cell to child in a lab. With children it is still easy to argue that if parents do not want them they can't kill them because they are unique and the society always needs more of them. But ai is not unique, you can have an ai interacting with real world, providing for itself, and use an exact copy of that ai in an experiment (even the ai could experiment on a copy of itself!). I think if a society decides to not allow any experiments on ai/brains in a jar, it would have hard time to enforce this, and if it succeeds enforcing the ban it will be out-competed by a neighbour that allows such experiments.

kbenson 8y ago
> I would argue that morality is not simply a philosophical matter, but also a strategy for a society to survive I'm not going to disagree with that. I argued the same earlier in this discussion in a more general sense. > But ai is not unique, you can have an ai interacting with real world, providing for itself, and use an exact copy of that ai in an experiment (even the ai could experiment on a copy of itself!). Which is an argument for duplicates, but 1) as a copy gets different inputs and diverges, it is unique, in the same way the you of this second is different slightly than the you before you started reading this sentence (and throw in Ship of Theseus for flavor). 2) even if the copies aren't viewed as diffierent, what about the last copy? If you've grown an AI, deleting the last copy is eliminating something something unique, if there was any possible input that cannot be replicated. > I think if a society decides to not allow any experiments on ai/brains in a jar, it would have hard time to enforce this, and if it succeeds enforcing the ban it will be out-competed by a neighbor that allows such experiments. The same could be said of any human experimentation that is banned. And that might be right. It's only been a relatively short time it's been in place in any enforceable way, in historical context.

by chr1 8y ago

kbenson 8y ago

> I would argue that morality is not simply a philosophical matter, but also a strategy for a society to survive I'm not going to disagree with that. I argued the same earlier in this discussion in a more general sense. > But ai is not unique, you can have an ai interacting with real world, providing for itself, and use an exact copy of that ai in an experiment (even the ai could experiment on a copy of itself!). Which is an argument for duplicates, but 1) as a copy gets different inputs and diverges, it is unique, in the same way the you of this second is different slightly than the you before you started reading this sentence (and throw in Ship of Theseus for flavor). 2) even if the copies aren't viewed as diffierent, what about the last copy? If you've grown an AI, deleting the last copy is eliminating something something unique, if there was any possible input that cannot be replicated. > I think if a society decides to not allow any experiments on ai/brains in a jar, it would have hard time to enforce this, and if it succeeds enforcing the ban it will be out-competed by a neighbor that allows such experiments. The same could be said of any human experimentation that is banned. And that might be right. It's only been a relatively short time it's been in place in any enforceable way, in historical context.