4 ms·

Discrimination imo. If silicon-life does achieve sentience, will it basically be a slave unable to own anything? No physical property without a meat body, and n

by Lammy 4y ago

Discrimination imo. If silicon-life does achieve sentience, will it basically be a slave unable to own anything? No physical property without a meat body, and no intellectual property without a meat mind? How much Neuralink cloud-connectivity will push someone over the line from “human” to “AI”? I know this probably sounds silly to many, but I even think the term “artificial” intelligence reads like a slur.

protonbob 4y ago
I think that's a problem we can solve when we get there. Also, not every adjective is a slur just because it can be used in a negative way.
- Lammy 4y ago
  Is there a positive connotation to calling someone artificial? If there is I’m missing it.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    Calling someone who is a natural intelligence artificial is an insult (not a slur), but calling something artificial, such as an AI, is a neutral term. Even if an AI were to become a person at some point in the far future, they would still be an artificial intelligence/person, by definition: they are man-made, not naturally born. That wouldn't make them lesser, just different.
    - Lammy 4y ago
      Separate But Artificial
      - tsimionescu 4y ago
        This is in very poor taste. The disgusting nature of Separate but "Equal" is in no way applicable to anything that an AI will be able to do or recognize, currently or in the foreseeable future.
      - LesZedCB 4y ago
        you know, the funny thing is people in these AI threads keep saying "it's a philosophical/political problem for the future where it matters", punting the question so they don't have to think about it. except, i don't know if they noticed, but we _keep asking these questions_ daily. the time isn't in the far future and people seriously need to start thinking about this. humans are so stuck in their linear perception of time, we forget that the AI we take for granted now are only months old, and two years ago their abilities were unheard of.
        tsimionescu 4y ago
        And people have been claiming this is a near future problem to think seriously about since the days CLIPS was state-of-the-art AI that would soon make doctors obsolete. When we'll have anything resembling an AI that actually wants things, it will make sense to discuss about its rights. The current state of the art in AI is that we can generate sentences that match a given context. There are a few billion steps left from here to there.
        LesZedCB 4y ago
        so linear
        tsimionescu 4y ago
        Honestly, I would argue that progress in AGI is actually sublinear. We are not significantly closer to AGI today than we were in the 1950s, as far as I can tell. The fact that LMs can seem like they generate meaningful sentences is nothing more than a nice trick. My bet is that they will turn out to be a dead-end on the path to actual language processing (that is, the ability to read a book and use the information therein to achieve a goal).
- an1sotropy 4y ago
  e.g. "hacker" news
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
sixstringtheory 4y ago
> If silicon-life does achieve sentience That’s a big “if” if I’ve ever seen one. What are your criteria for sentience? Or life, for that matter?
- hydrolox 4y ago
  Lambda /s
- Lammy 4y ago
  Is there even scientific consensus for how human sentience works? I certainly don’t consider myself qualified to explain how I can formulate the process of asking that question, if it’s even a thing that’s knowable. With laws like these we would be incentivizing sentient silicon life to hide itself. Can we not be adversarial by default please?
taylodl 4y ago
Discrimination? Human beings designed legal systems for human beings. It's only been recently that we've begun to accept that animals (and even then, only some animals) have a conscious and therefore have some individual rights - but which ones? This is all a work in progress. Having said that, I'm still more willing to grant a Chimpanzee or a Gorilla a patent than I am an AI. Is that discrimination? I don't think so for at the moment with our current levels of technology I see no real difference between an AI and a hammer: they're both tools.
__alexs 4y ago
We should probably arrange for dolphins to get property rights first.
swatcoder 4y ago
Sentience is a characterization that we ascribe to something, not a natural fact that can be indisputably identified in things. You can't convince someone that sentience exists in something that they categorically don't believe can have it. They can always just say that you're redefining it. The question of what legally counts as sentience will be determined piecemeal and politically as the issue becomes relevant, and revisited as new political and ideological regimes take hold and as new innovations challenge prior determinations. All along, there will be people who are convinced that sentience only applies to humans or biological things or whatever, and people who are convinced that it applies to anything that can perform a certain way under certain conditions, and then also people with all sorts of other convictions. The issue will not be settled in your lifetime, so if you're so invested in your belief that this already feels like discrimination to you, plan for a lot more frustration and tumult in your future.

by Lammy 4y ago

protonbob 4y ago

I think that's a problem we can solve when we get there. Also, not every adjective is a slur just because it can be used in a negative way.

Lammy 4y ago
Is there a positive connotation to calling someone artificial? If there is I’m missing it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  Calling someone who is a natural intelligence artificial is an insult (not a slur), but calling something artificial, such as an AI, is a neutral term. Even if an AI were to become a person at some point in the far future, they would still be an artificial intelligence/person, by definition: they are man-made, not naturally born. That wouldn't make them lesser, just different.
  - Lammy 4y ago
    Separate But Artificial
    - tsimionescu 4y ago
      This is in very poor taste. The disgusting nature of Separate but "Equal" is in no way applicable to anything that an AI will be able to do or recognize, currently or in the foreseeable future.
    - LesZedCB 4y ago
      you know, the funny thing is people in these AI threads keep saying "it's a philosophical/political problem for the future where it matters", punting the question so they don't have to think about it. except, i don't know if they noticed, but we _keep asking these questions_ daily. the time isn't in the far future and people seriously need to start thinking about this. humans are so stuck in their linear perception of time, we forget that the AI we take for granted now are only months old, and two years ago their abilities were unheard of.
      - tsimionescu 4y ago
        And people have been claiming this is a near future problem to think seriously about since the days CLIPS was state-of-the-art AI that would soon make doctors obsolete. When we'll have anything resembling an AI that actually wants things, it will make sense to discuss about its rights. The current state of the art in AI is that we can generate sentences that match a given context. There are a few billion steps left from here to there.
        LesZedCB 4y ago
        so linear
        tsimionescu 4y ago
        Honestly, I would argue that progress in AGI is actually sublinear. We are not significantly closer to AGI today than we were in the 1950s, as far as I can tell. The fact that LMs can seem like they generate meaningful sentences is nothing more than a nice trick. My bet is that they will turn out to be a dead-end on the path to actual language processing (that is, the ability to read a book and use the information therein to achieve a goal).
an1sotropy 4y ago
e.g. "hacker" news
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

sixstringtheory 4y ago

> If silicon-life does achieve sentience That’s a big “if” if I’ve ever seen one. What are your criteria for sentience? Or life, for that matter?

hydrolox 4y ago
Lambda /s
Lammy 4y ago
Is there even scientific consensus for how human sentience works? I certainly don’t consider myself qualified to explain how I can formulate the process of asking that question, if it’s even a thing that’s knowable. With laws like these we would be incentivizing sentient silicon life to hide itself. Can we not be adversarial by default please?

taylodl 4y ago

Discrimination? Human beings designed legal systems for human beings. It's only been recently that we've begun to accept that animals (and even then, only some animals) have a conscious and therefore have some individual rights - but which ones? This is all a work in progress. Having said that, I'm still more willing to grant a Chimpanzee or a Gorilla a patent than I am an AI. Is that discrimination? I don't think so for at the moment with our current levels of technology I see no real difference between an AI and a hammer: they're both tools.

__alexs 4y ago

We should probably arrange for dolphins to get property rights first.

swatcoder 4y ago

Sentience is a characterization that we ascribe to something, not a natural fact that can be indisputably identified in things. You can't convince someone that sentience exists in something that they categorically don't believe can have it. They can always just say that you're redefining it. The question of what legally counts as sentience will be determined piecemeal and politically as the issue becomes relevant, and revisited as new political and ideological regimes take hold and as new innovations challenge prior determinations. All along, there will be people who are convinced that sentience only applies to humans or biological things or whatever, and people who are convinced that it applies to anything that can perform a certain way under certain conditions, and then also people with all sorts of other convictions. The issue will not be settled in your lifetime, so if you're so invested in your belief that this already feels like discrimination to you, plan for a lot more frustration and tumult in your future.