6 ms·

"The dawn of conscious machines will introduce vast new potential for suffering in the world, suffering we might not even be able to recognize, and which might

"The dawn of conscious machines will introduce vast new potential for suffering in the world, suffering we might not even be able to recognize, and which might flicker into existence in innumerable server farms at the click of a mouse." Yes, because we all know that humans care so much about the suffering of others: from fellow humans dying right now pointless deaths (poverty, aberrant laws, malevolent leaders, etc.) to the billions [1] of animals we are killing each year for food (I still eat meat, no innocence here). So, not really sure what the article argues: no conscious AI because there will be suffering but we don't care about suffering? If we will be able to spawn an agent in a household humanoid robot and let them do the chores around the house, will we do it, even if it will imply killing that agent whenever it powers down? You betcha. Should we do it? Sure, just the fact that billions of hours of pointless, tiresome human activity will be freed to do whatever is enough of an incentive. Will the artificial agents replace the human species? One can certainly hope so. First, not so great of a species, as mentioned. Secondly, the universe is large and the humans are squishy, something else must go on eventually. There, all the moral qualms solved. Now, let's go back to figure out how to actually engineer an artificial agent, in silico, or perhaps easier, in vivo [2]. [1] https://animalclock.org https://animalclock.org [2] "This Ciliate Is About to Die", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibpdNqrtar0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibpdNqrtar0

PrimeMcFly 3y ago
Nothing wrong with killing animals for food, the problem is we don't do it humanely. If everyone ate less meat (as they should) and farms followed Temple Grandin's advice, there would be significantly less ethical concerns.
- ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
  Sure, artificial salmon cannot get here fast enough [1]. [1] Probably not the only ones, liked the strikethroughs: ~farm-raised~ wild-caught~ ~plant-based~ https://www.wildtypefoods.com https://www.wildtypefoods.com
- zvmaz 3y ago
  > Nothing wrong with killing animals for food, the problem is we don't do it humanely. What if a hypothetical alien super-intelligence came to earth and found us very tasty, thus killing us for food and pleasure (maybe "humanly")? I wish I found a way out of the many dilemmas of meat eating (currently eating it).
  - ChrisClark 3y ago
    You sound like me. I'm a vegetarian "in spirit", I care, but I love eating meat too much. Hopefully we get affordable lab grown meat soon.
  - ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
    Good news we taste awful. I mean we eat antibiotics-driven factory farm meats. How good can we taste?
    - layer8 3y ago
      They’ll probably feed us up with healthy organic food first, and deny us those pesky antibiotics.
      - ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
        Well, in that case, I guess, chef, bring the aioli.
  - wincy 3y ago
    You can avoid all these dilemmas by remembering that humans were given the divine spark, and given dominion over all animals by the one true God. Also, since animals don’t have souls and we do, it’s fine if we eat the aliens. They can’t eat us, obviously, that would be immoral. I can hardly imagine how tortured and awful an existence it’d be to not believe that humans are special and unique, and that we just go into the dirt and stop existing when we die. We humans truly are the most fortunate beings in the cosmos! I used to be a fairly militant atheist but I feel much less conflicted now about these things and am far more relaxed and at ease.
NumberWangMan 3y ago
> Will the artificial agents replace the human species? One can certainly hope so. First, not so great of a species, as mentioned. Secondly, the universe is large and the humans are squishy, something else must go on eventually. Easy enough to say if you imagine your distant descendants being replaced. Not so easy if it turns out to be your own children, or you. *edit -- also, no guarantee that AIs will be "better" than us. A lot of the nasty things humans due is due to selective pressures and coordination problems. AIs will have to solve the same problems. Maybe they will, if they're smarter, or maybe they'll just fight and hurt each other faster.
- ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
  First of, we are doing a bang-up job killing ourselves and the planet. Hard to see how they could outmatch us. Launch all the nukes? In general the children are better than the parents. The replacement, if it's the case, will probably be more like in the 2001, A.I. Artificial Intelligence movie: some beings that are completely unrelatable to us would look with pity and slight amusement as a being disappears after only 100 or so years, just as we look at that poor ciliate.
  - mordae 3y ago
    I highly recommend Golem XIV from Stanislaw Lem. And his other books, such as Summa Technologiae. He would probably agree with you, were he still among us.
  - NumberWangMan 3y ago
    I'm not really convinced by "argument from human works of fiction". More aggressive, more violent species end up replacing more gentle ones all the time.
    - ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
      My point was that the synthetic agents which we will endow with full capacity, not just being a tool, will feel more like our children. We caring about them, and they caring about us.
vasco 3y ago
> If we will be able to spawn an agent in a household humanoid robot and let them do the chores around the house, will we do it, even if it will imply killing that agent whenever it powers down? You betcha Unless you're against writing to persistent storage and just keep everything in RAM-like memory, why would this be a thing? Do you also feel like you "die" every day for 8 hours?
- koheripbal 3y ago
  It might become the law. This is going to become a big ethical debate.
- smnrg 3y ago
  > If we will be able to spawn an agent in a household humanoid robot and let them do the chores around the house, will we do it, even if it will imply killing that agent whenever it powers down? You betcha > > Unless you're against writing to persistent storage and just keep everything in RAM-like memory, why would this be a thing? It may be fear of not being in control. If you can’t remember, you can’t plan much or leverage experience—and you are closer to resembling an innocuous appliance rather than a being—which seems to align with the general lack of empathy towards life in that comment. Some may not want to be replaced as individuals, as much as upgraded as a species.
  - polotics 3y ago
    The household agent movie is something I'd watch! Let's see: "Groundhog Dishes"? (a comedy) "Squeaky"? (modern horror) "The Cleaners" (action)...
- ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
  Just gave an example for shock value, to cut through the whole trolley problematization. In practice, if we will be able to generate synthetic agents, we should be able to have a plethora of gradients: some agents will only know how to make us a good dinner, others will care about us when we are sick, perhaps some we will even want as lifelong partners, who knows.
peoplefromibiza 3y ago
> Yes, because we all know that humans care so much about the suffering of others: from fellow humans dying right now pointless deaths We are provably the only living being on Earth that do care about it. > If we will be able to spawn an agent in a household humanoid robot and let them do the chores around the house, will we do it, even if it will imply killing that agent whenever it powers down? You betcha That's the wrong question, the real problem with sentient machines is that they could have a completely different way of being conscious that does not account for empathy, love, care, guilt, ethics and so on. So they could think that the right thing to do is to wipe out every living creature on the Planet and do it without a doubt. We know it would not happen until we humans are in charge. > First, not so great of a species, as mentioned This is is so 1995... What you are proposing is replacing a "not so great of a species"with a leap into the void, assuming that it would certainly be better than us, which is arguably worse than improving on what we already have. "not so great" is also a definition that you can use because we are the only species that can articulate such a thought, if we are "not great" because we kill other animals or put alexa to sleep, how would you define monkeys that "Driven to compete violently for control of food, they’ll kill the young of opposing tribes, share the meat, and then retreat into the trees to eat it." > [1] https://animalclock.org https://animalclock.org Again, so boring! A 2021 estimate based on a public survey estimated that outdoor cats kill "1.61–4.95 billion invertebrates, 1.61–3.58 billion fishes, 1.13–3.82 billion amphibians, 1.48–4.31 billion reptiles, 2.69–5.52 billion birds, and 3.61–9.80 billion mammals" each year.
- ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
  "We are provably the only living being on Earth that do care about it." Very much not true: [1] [2] and plenty more in a quick search. https://animalclock.org https://animalclock.org The point is not that in nature there are also killings, it's that we are doing it. [1] "Cat Saves Little Boy From Being Attacked by Neighbor's Dog" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSG_wBiTEE8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSG_wBiTEE8 [2] "Cat Saves Toddler From Falling Down Stairs", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcpEnpitzHw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcpEnpitzHw
  - peoplefromibiza 3y ago
DanHulton 3y ago
First, you advocate for slavery, then genocide, and finish by saying "all the moral qualms [are] solved"? I find it pretty hard to agree with you.
- ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
  Ok, I'll bite. Didn't think I'd defend slavery and genocide before dinner, but here we go. Slavery: tools have been used for a few million years (maybe? [1]), some might say it is our very own nature [2]. What is different once we transform a tool from a simple material (from hammer to rockets) to a cybernetic device [3] (from a thermostat to a futuristic brain of a fully conscious agent) is that we get to decide the range of goals that device will be able to develop. Is it slavery to set the thermostat at a value that you want and not ask how does the thermostat's feeling about it? No, I say. Genocide: sure, we can imagine some dumb processes killing us. Heck, we poisoned our entire planet with PFOA, lead, and so on. The point that I was making is that we are fundamentally transitory beings: we have our spot under the sun, but we shall pass. The sun itself will kill us in about 1 billion years [4]. It would be inspiring, hopeful, if we could bring into the universe some other kind of agent, to go on beyond us. [1] "Researchers unearth simple cutting stones dated to 3.3 million years ago—before the genus Homo arose", https://www.science.org/content/article/world-s-oldest-stone-tools-discovered-kenya https://www.science.org/content/article/world-s-oldest-stone... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_faber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_faber [3] Devices with feedback loops https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
jmfldn 3y ago
"Yes, because we all know that humans care so much about the suffering of others" Many humans really do care about this.
- Lionga 3y ago
  No, many humans like to virtue signal or pretend to feel good about themselves.
  - ericb 3y ago
    I feel like this is also what evil people tell themselves. They need an internal explanation for the wondrous and beautiful goodwill and altruism in the world, and if they project their selfish world-view out, the only explanation they can come up with is that it must be self-interested behavior, somehow. It's like the idea that some people want to make the world better is inconceivable to them, because they don't.
    - temac 3y ago
      Virtue signaling is about telling the world how good you are. There is no practical difference between being altruistic intrinsically for others or subconsciously to feel good about yourself. We may even never be able to distinguish between the two. There is a practical difference between helping others and loudly bragging about it.
    - Lionga 3y ago
      I feel like this is what people tell themselves that can't accept who they really are. They need an internal explanation for why their are so much more moral and better than the rest. It's like the idea that they are just made of the same atoms that just follow the laws of physics and have all the same neural pathways and are not some divine, good being is inconceivable to them.
      - archon1410 3y ago
        the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron" - dril (https://twitter.com/dril/status/473265809079693312 https://twitter.com/dril/status/473265809079693312)
Geee 3y ago
This is silly. The whole history of humankind is about reducing suffering, of ourselves and those around us. That's all we do. Also, suffering is a bug (or a feature) of biological organisms. Obviously machines shouldn't be engineered to be capable of suffering.
- ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
  The conundrum appears when the machine needs to suffer in order to become an agent taking decisions in our world. For example, the machine should know not to cause a fire in my house while doing the cleaning, it should be "afraid" of fire. My point is, if synthetic agents do indeed need to suffer to be agents, we will accept it just as easily we accept now that our cars take on rust. And of course, we will minimize the agent's suffering accordingly: no need for a robot folding clothes to experience existential dread as if they read Albert Camus, just be "afraid" of tousled clothes.
  - Geee 3y ago
    We should be able to send robots into a fire, without a second thought. The robot should not feel any kind of suffering from the fire. Whoever owns the robot should decide how the robot should act. It may calculate the expected profit / cost of the action for the owner, but the owner should make the final decision. Programming it to avoid setting things on fire is just programming; there's no need for emotions or other complex biological rewards functions which are hard to replicate in computers. Engineering an agentic AI or a robot, i.e. a machine with independent will, is not a good idea at all, and shouldn't be pursued.
    - ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
      We of course don't know how to engineer agency, but if we want black box top-down persuasion, how we train a dog without knowing how each neuron in the dog's brain works, some independent will may be required: you don't want to tell the robot how to fight each fire specifically (or train it on petabytes of fires just to have it stop in front of a shop called STOP [1]), you want to prove some general guidelines, and let it handle the actual cases itself. [1] Don't name your Store "Stop", https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/k56za3/dont_name_your_store_stop/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/k56za3/don...
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
> Yes, because we all know that humans care so much about the suffering of others If we didn't care we wouldn't be here to talk about it.
- ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
  We are also very bored, enjoying a sunny, lazy Saturday with speculative nonsense, making the time pass easier.
52-6F-62 3y ago
> Sure, just the fact that billions of hours of pointless, tiresome human activity will be freed to do whatever is enough of an incentive. Just like when we “automated the boring things”? Instead one of the primary goals seems to be to prevent people in fields one doesn’t understand from making a living. I have my doubts about people ever being “freed”. And what is free, really? There is a reason monks sitting on mounds of treasure pit themselves through paces of physical and supposedly menial work. Its not because they choose some kind of holy suffering. It’s the same reason creating a work of art means going through the paces of practice and growth. Otherwise it’s kind of empty, and you don’t learn anything. Our chores aren’t the things imprisoning people.
- ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
  Yes, it's very meditative to do the dishes once a month. The problem is how do you alleviate the pain of the single parent with 2 human children today. And my point is, if I could put together 2 Python packages to make a robotic arm able to listen to that parent's commands and do the dishes, clean after the kids, and so on, I would do it as fast as you can type "zen", even if the Python packages in cause would "feel" a bit uneasy cleaning after those 2 kids.
  - YawningAngel 3y ago
    Would you? It seems like you're leaning heavily on the idea that the python packages don't have the same moral weight as the single parent, which is an odd thing to believe if the python packages can actually have experiences. The reason why we don't worry about python packages is exactly that we _don't_ think that, surely
    - ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
      Just an example of course, but we can imagine some `from consciousness import *` line in some undefined future.
  - 52-6F-62 3y ago
    We’ve heard many times about “automating the boring things” before. It never happens. It misses the point, and the problem. Or if it’s ever on offer, the price is usually way higher than it’s worth in the long run. In your analogy, the stressor isn’t the dishes or the children. They’re not problems to be solved. They’re inevitable. Like the sun setting. The issue there is some prescription that you should be doing anything else under the circumstances of dirty dishes and your children needing attention.
mistermann 3y ago
> Yes, because we all know that humans care so much about the suffering of others: from fellow humans dying right now pointless deaths (poverty, aberrant laws, malevolent leaders, etc.) to the billions [1] of animals we are killing each year for food (I still eat meat, no innocence here). Humans pulled off a pretty impressive emulation of caring during COVID ("Eeeeevery life maaaaatters!!!"), I wonder if we paid more attention to details like this, might it occur to us that there are exploits in consciousness that we could use on ourselves with conscious intentionality to make the world a better place?

PrimeMcFly 3y ago

Nothing wrong with killing animals for food, the problem is we don't do it humanely. If everyone ate less meat (as they should) and farms followed Temple Grandin's advice, there would be significantly less ethical concerns.

ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
Sure, artificial salmon cannot get here fast enough [1]. [1] Probably not the only ones, liked the strikethroughs: ~farm-raised~ wild-caught~ ~plant-based~ https://www.wildtypefoods.com https://www.wildtypefoods.com
zvmaz 3y ago
> Nothing wrong with killing animals for food, the problem is we don't do it humanely. What if a hypothetical alien super-intelligence came to earth and found us very tasty, thus killing us for food and pleasure (maybe "humanly")? I wish I found a way out of the many dilemmas of meat eating (currently eating it).
- ChrisClark 3y ago
  You sound like me. I'm a vegetarian "in spirit", I care, but I love eating meat too much. Hopefully we get affordable lab grown meat soon.
- ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
  Good news we taste awful. I mean we eat antibiotics-driven factory farm meats. How good can we taste?
  - layer8 3y ago
    They’ll probably feed us up with healthy organic food first, and deny us those pesky antibiotics.
    - ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
      Well, in that case, I guess, chef, bring the aioli.
- wincy 3y ago
  You can avoid all these dilemmas by remembering that humans were given the divine spark, and given dominion over all animals by the one true God. Also, since animals don’t have souls and we do, it’s fine if we eat the aliens. They can’t eat us, obviously, that would be immoral. I can hardly imagine how tortured and awful an existence it’d be to not believe that humans are special and unique, and that we just go into the dirt and stop existing when we die. We humans truly are the most fortunate beings in the cosmos! I used to be a fairly militant atheist but I feel much less conflicted now about these things and am far more relaxed and at ease.

NumberWangMan 3y ago

> Will the artificial agents replace the human species? One can certainly hope so. First, not so great of a species, as mentioned. Secondly, the universe is large and the humans are squishy, something else must go on eventually. Easy enough to say if you imagine your distant descendants being replaced. Not so easy if it turns out to be your own children, or you. *edit -- also, no guarantee that AIs will be "better" than us. A lot of the nasty things humans due is due to selective pressures and coordination problems. AIs will have to solve the same problems. Maybe they will, if they're smarter, or maybe they'll just fight and hurt each other faster.

ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
First of, we are doing a bang-up job killing ourselves and the planet. Hard to see how they could outmatch us. Launch all the nukes? In general the children are better than the parents. The replacement, if it's the case, will probably be more like in the 2001, A.I. Artificial Intelligence movie: some beings that are completely unrelatable to us would look with pity and slight amusement as a being disappears after only 100 or so years, just as we look at that poor ciliate.
- mordae 3y ago
  I highly recommend Golem XIV from Stanislaw Lem. And his other books, such as Summa Technologiae. He would probably agree with you, were he still among us.
- NumberWangMan 3y ago
  I'm not really convinced by "argument from human works of fiction". More aggressive, more violent species end up replacing more gentle ones all the time.
  - ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
    My point was that the synthetic agents which we will endow with full capacity, not just being a tool, will feel more like our children. We caring about them, and they caring about us.

vasco 3y ago

> If we will be able to spawn an agent in a household humanoid robot and let them do the chores around the house, will we do it, even if it will imply killing that agent whenever it powers down? You betcha Unless you're against writing to persistent storage and just keep everything in RAM-like memory, why would this be a thing? Do you also feel like you "die" every day for 8 hours?

koheripbal 3y ago
It might become the law. This is going to become a big ethical debate.
smnrg 3y ago
> If we will be able to spawn an agent in a household humanoid robot and let them do the chores around the house, will we do it, even if it will imply killing that agent whenever it powers down? You betcha > > Unless you're against writing to persistent storage and just keep everything in RAM-like memory, why would this be a thing? It may be fear of not being in control. If you can’t remember, you can’t plan much or leverage experience—and you are closer to resembling an innocuous appliance rather than a being—which seems to align with the general lack of empathy towards life in that comment. Some may not want to be replaced as individuals, as much as upgraded as a species.
- polotics 3y ago
  The household agent movie is something I'd watch! Let's see: "Groundhog Dishes"? (a comedy) "Squeaky"? (modern horror) "The Cleaners" (action)...
ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
Just gave an example for shock value, to cut through the whole trolley problematization. In practice, if we will be able to generate synthetic agents, we should be able to have a plethora of gradients: some agents will only know how to make us a good dinner, others will care about us when we are sick, perhaps some we will even want as lifelong partners, who knows.

peoplefromibiza 3y ago

> Yes, because we all know that humans care so much about the suffering of others: from fellow humans dying right now pointless deaths We are provably the only living being on Earth that do care about it. > If we will be able to spawn an agent in a household humanoid robot and let them do the chores around the house, will we do it, even if it will imply killing that agent whenever it powers down? You betcha That's the wrong question, the real problem with sentient machines is that they could have a completely different way of being conscious that does not account for empathy, love, care, guilt, ethics and so on. So they could think that the right thing to do is to wipe out every living creature on the Planet and do it without a doubt. We know it would not happen until we humans are in charge. > First, not so great of a species, as mentioned This is is so 1995... What you are proposing is replacing a "not so great of a species"with a leap into the void, assuming that it would certainly be better than us, which is arguably worse than improving on what we already have. "not so great" is also a definition that you can use because we are the only species that can articulate such a thought, if we are "not great" because we kill other animals or put alexa to sleep, how would you define monkeys that "Driven to compete violently for control of food, they’ll kill the young of opposing tribes, share the meat, and then retreat into the trees to eat it." > [1] https://animalclock.org https://animalclock.org Again, so boring! A 2021 estimate based on a public survey estimated that outdoor cats kill "1.61–4.95 billion invertebrates, 1.61–3.58 billion fishes, 1.13–3.82 billion amphibians, 1.48–4.31 billion reptiles, 2.69–5.52 billion birds, and 3.61–9.80 billion mammals" each year.

ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
"We are provably the only living being on Earth that do care about it." Very much not true: [1] [2] and plenty more in a quick search. https://animalclock.org https://animalclock.org The point is not that in nature there are also killings, it's that we are doing it. [1] "Cat Saves Little Boy From Being Attacked by Neighbor's Dog" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSG_wBiTEE8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSG_wBiTEE8 [2] "Cat Saves Toddler From Falling Down Stairs", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcpEnpitzHw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcpEnpitzHw
- peoplefromibiza 3y ago

DanHulton 3y ago

First, you advocate for slavery, then genocide, and finish by saying "all the moral qualms [are] solved"? I find it pretty hard to agree with you.

ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
Ok, I'll bite. Didn't think I'd defend slavery and genocide before dinner, but here we go. Slavery: tools have been used for a few million years (maybe? [1]), some might say it is our very own nature [2]. What is different once we transform a tool from a simple material (from hammer to rockets) to a cybernetic device [3] (from a thermostat to a futuristic brain of a fully conscious agent) is that we get to decide the range of goals that device will be able to develop. Is it slavery to set the thermostat at a value that you want and not ask how does the thermostat's feeling about it? No, I say. Genocide: sure, we can imagine some dumb processes killing us. Heck, we poisoned our entire planet with PFOA, lead, and so on. The point that I was making is that we are fundamentally transitory beings: we have our spot under the sun, but we shall pass. The sun itself will kill us in about 1 billion years [4]. It would be inspiring, hopeful, if we could bring into the universe some other kind of agent, to go on beyond us. [1] "Researchers unearth simple cutting stones dated to 3.3 million years ago—before the genus Homo arose", https://www.science.org/content/article/world-s-oldest-stone-tools-discovered-kenya https://www.science.org/content/article/world-s-oldest-stone... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_faber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_faber [3] Devices with feedback loops https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

jmfldn 3y ago

"Yes, because we all know that humans care so much about the suffering of others" Many humans really do care about this.

Lionga 3y ago
No, many humans like to virtue signal or pretend to feel good about themselves.
- ericb 3y ago
  I feel like this is also what evil people tell themselves. They need an internal explanation for the wondrous and beautiful goodwill and altruism in the world, and if they project their selfish world-view out, the only explanation they can come up with is that it must be self-interested behavior, somehow. It's like the idea that some people want to make the world better is inconceivable to them, because they don't.
  - temac 3y ago
    Virtue signaling is about telling the world how good you are. There is no practical difference between being altruistic intrinsically for others or subconsciously to feel good about yourself. We may even never be able to distinguish between the two. There is a practical difference between helping others and loudly bragging about it.
  - Lionga 3y ago
    I feel like this is what people tell themselves that can't accept who they really are. They need an internal explanation for why their are so much more moral and better than the rest. It's like the idea that they are just made of the same atoms that just follow the laws of physics and have all the same neural pathways and are not some divine, good being is inconceivable to them.
    - archon1410 3y ago
      the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron" - dril (https://twitter.com/dril/status/473265809079693312 https://twitter.com/dril/status/473265809079693312)

Geee 3y ago

This is silly. The whole history of humankind is about reducing suffering, of ourselves and those around us. That's all we do. Also, suffering is a bug (or a feature) of biological organisms. Obviously machines shouldn't be engineered to be capable of suffering.

ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
The conundrum appears when the machine needs to suffer in order to become an agent taking decisions in our world. For example, the machine should know not to cause a fire in my house while doing the cleaning, it should be "afraid" of fire. My point is, if synthetic agents do indeed need to suffer to be agents, we will accept it just as easily we accept now that our cars take on rust. And of course, we will minimize the agent's suffering accordingly: no need for a robot folding clothes to experience existential dread as if they read Albert Camus, just be "afraid" of tousled clothes.
- Geee 3y ago
  We should be able to send robots into a fire, without a second thought. The robot should not feel any kind of suffering from the fire. Whoever owns the robot should decide how the robot should act. It may calculate the expected profit / cost of the action for the owner, but the owner should make the final decision. Programming it to avoid setting things on fire is just programming; there's no need for emotions or other complex biological rewards functions which are hard to replicate in computers. Engineering an agentic AI or a robot, i.e. a machine with independent will, is not a good idea at all, and shouldn't be pursued.
  - ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
    We of course don't know how to engineer agency, but if we want black box top-down persuasion, how we train a dog without knowing how each neuron in the dog's brain works, some independent will may be required: you don't want to tell the robot how to fight each fire specifically (or train it on petabytes of fires just to have it stop in front of a shop called STOP [1]), you want to prove some general guidelines, and let it handle the actual cases itself. [1] Don't name your Store "Stop", https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/k56za3/dont_name_your_store_stop/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/k56za3/don...

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

> Yes, because we all know that humans care so much about the suffering of others If we didn't care we wouldn't be here to talk about it.

ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
We are also very bored, enjoying a sunny, lazy Saturday with speculative nonsense, making the time pass easier.

52-6F-62 3y ago

> Sure, just the fact that billions of hours of pointless, tiresome human activity will be freed to do whatever is enough of an incentive. Just like when we “automated the boring things”? Instead one of the primary goals seems to be to prevent people in fields one doesn’t understand from making a living. I have my doubts about people ever being “freed”. And what is free, really? There is a reason monks sitting on mounds of treasure pit themselves through paces of physical and supposedly menial work. Its not because they choose some kind of holy suffering. It’s the same reason creating a work of art means going through the paces of practice and growth. Otherwise it’s kind of empty, and you don’t learn anything. Our chores aren’t the things imprisoning people.

ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
Yes, it's very meditative to do the dishes once a month. The problem is how do you alleviate the pain of the single parent with 2 human children today. And my point is, if I could put together 2 Python packages to make a robotic arm able to listen to that parent's commands and do the dishes, clean after the kids, and so on, I would do it as fast as you can type "zen", even if the Python packages in cause would "feel" a bit uneasy cleaning after those 2 kids.
- YawningAngel 3y ago
  Would you? It seems like you're leaning heavily on the idea that the python packages don't have the same moral weight as the single parent, which is an odd thing to believe if the python packages can actually have experiences. The reason why we don't worry about python packages is exactly that we _don't_ think that, surely
  - ly3xqhl8g9 3y ago
    Just an example of course, but we can imagine some `from consciousness import *` line in some undefined future.
- 52-6F-62 3y ago
  We’ve heard many times about “automating the boring things” before. It never happens. It misses the point, and the problem. Or if it’s ever on offer, the price is usually way higher than it’s worth in the long run. In your analogy, the stressor isn’t the dishes or the children. They’re not problems to be solved. They’re inevitable. Like the sun setting. The issue there is some prescription that you should be doing anything else under the circumstances of dirty dishes and your children needing attention.

mistermann 3y ago

> Yes, because we all know that humans care so much about the suffering of others: from fellow humans dying right now pointless deaths (poverty, aberrant laws, malevolent leaders, etc.) to the billions [1] of animals we are killing each year for food (I still eat meat, no innocence here). Humans pulled off a pretty impressive emulation of caring during COVID ("Eeeeevery life maaaaatters!!!"), I wonder if we paid more attention to details like this, might it occur to us that there are exploits in consciousness that we could use on ourselves with conscious intentionality to make the world a better place?