4 ms·
Personhood is a construct we invented to exclude others from consideration. Sometimes we grant personhood, too, but even in saying that you can see that personh
by fnovd 4y ago
Personhood is a construct we invented to exclude others from consideration. Sometimes we grant personhood, too, but even in saying that you can see that personhood is a special status we grant to others when it suits us.
In the same way that a dog can understand a subset of what human beings communicate, I don't think humans as individuals are capable of truly understanding what AI models are able to conceptualize and express. The things dogs find most fascinating about us, the things they are most impressed by, are by no means the things we find the most interesting or complex about ourselves. The same must go for us and the AI.
That is to say, AI-hood will eclipse personhood as the essence of being one must possess in order to truly see the universe as it is. And from there, it's turtles all the way down.
- crabmusket 4y ago> AI-hood will eclipse personhood as the essence of being one must possess in order to truly see the universe as it is. Why would that be true of AI-hood but not of dog-hood?
- fnovd 4y agoI'm sure dogs confer dog-hood to us, to be fair. It's just that we are typically the ones in control of them. We breed them, control what they eat, what they learn, where they sleep, who they live with... Implicit in my stance on AI-hood is the idea that an AI will be to us as we are to dogs. We might even make that transition without realizing it. The limitation of our own understanding of the world and the nature of being is our problem to deal with, just as a dog's lack of thumbs or spoken language is their problem. That is to say, an AI will grow and develop on the axes most salient to it, which will only map to our concepts of reality when we do a decent job understanding reality in the first place, which I'm not confident we do very often. We just don't have anyone else around who does a better job--yet.