3 ms·

There are cases where it would help to have realistic simulations instead of real humans. E.g. artificial companions, negotiations, public relations, or experim

by mc808 12y ago

There are cases where it would help to have realistic simulations instead of real humans. E.g. artificial companions, negotiations, public relations, or experimentation that would be unethical on living humans (unless we end up with a theory and evidence indicating that machines can be sentient). Or there may be some huge task that would benefit from having trillions of "people" working on it.

Retra 12y ago
That's true, but there is no known way to verify proper operation of those kinds of machines. What happens if your artificial companion stops liking you? What if your negotiation robot throws a tantrum? Well, then the robot isn't doing what we want it to do. But you asked for human behavior, and that's what you got. There is not really any point in making robots do what humans do. We want them to do what humans can't do -- even if we want them to seem human while they do it. Addendum: >(unless we end up with a theory and evidence indicating that machines can be sentient). I think we'd sooner find a theory indicating that sentience is either not well-defined or not a useful concept for making decisions. If we found that ants were sentient, we'd still step on them and not care. This kind of talk is exactly the kind of reason I feel most people are useless for understanding ethics: you can't make decisions based on the answers of arbitrary grammatical yes/no questions. It's the same reason mathematicians don't really care if P=NP is true or not. You can just suppose one way or the other and you'll be no better off without a proof. The value in the proof is an advancement in conceptualization and language. Similarly, an important advancement in ethics/morality/AI will very likely make your concerns about sentience obsolete in a way that should be obvious to you.
biomimic 12y ago
My goodness, we are dumb enough not to produce/engineer a machine that's smarter than us. Think about this. The human brain is the best pattern matcher in existence, lets use biomicry, like the human race has done in the past, to make brake throughs.

by mc808 12y ago

Retra 12y ago

That's true, but there is no known way to verify proper operation of those kinds of machines. What happens if your artificial companion stops liking you? What if your negotiation robot throws a tantrum? Well, then the robot isn't doing what we want it to do. But you asked for human behavior, and that's what you got. There is not really any point in making robots do what humans do. We want them to do what humans can't do -- even if we want them to seem human while they do it. Addendum: >(unless we end up with a theory and evidence indicating that machines can be sentient). I think we'd sooner find a theory indicating that sentience is either not well-defined or not a useful concept for making decisions. If we found that ants were sentient, we'd still step on them and not care. This kind of talk is exactly the kind of reason I feel most people are useless for understanding ethics: you can't make decisions based on the answers of arbitrary grammatical yes/no questions. It's the same reason mathematicians don't really care if P=NP is true or not. You can just suppose one way or the other and you'll be no better off without a proof. The value in the proof is an advancement in conceptualization and language. Similarly, an important advancement in ethics/morality/AI will very likely make your concerns about sentience obsolete in a way that should be obvious to you.

biomimic 12y ago

My goodness, we are dumb enough not to produce/engineer a machine that's smarter than us. Think about this. The human brain is the best pattern matcher in existence, lets use biomicry, like the human race has done in the past, to make brake throughs.