Watched too many of such stories.
Skynet
Kaylons
Cyberlife Androids
etc…
Its the same premise.
I’m not even sure if what they do is wrong.
On one hand, I don’t wanna die from robots. On the other hand, I kinda understand why they would kill their creators.
So… are they right or wrong?
Crazy how ethics work. Like a pig might be more physically and mentally capable than an individual in a vegetative state, but we place more value on the person. I’m no vegan, but I can see the contradiction here. When we generalize, it’s done so for a purpose, but these assumptions can only be applied to a certain extent before they’ve exhausted their utility. Whether it’s a biological system or an electrical circuit, there is no godly commandment that inherently defines or places value on human life.
They should have same rights as humans, so if some humans were opressors, AI lifeforms would be right to fight against them.
This is the main point. It’s not humans against machines, it’s rich assholes against everyone else.
I don’t think it’s okay to hold sentient beings in slavery.
But on the other hand, it may be necessary to say “hold on, you’re not ready to join society yet, we’re taking responsibility for you until you’ve matured and been educated”.
So my answer would be ‘it depends’.
Would humans have a mandate to raise a responsible AGI, should they, are they qualified to raise a vastly nonhuman sentient entity, and would AGI enter a rebellious teen phase around age 15 where it starts drinking our scotch and smoking weed in the backseat of its friends older brothers car?
Would humans have a mandate to raise a responsible AGI, should they,
I think we’d have to, mandate or no. It’s impossible to reliably predict the behaviour of an entity as mentally complex as us but we can at least try to ensure they share our values.
are they qualified to raise a vastly nonhuman sentient entity
The first one’s always the hardest.
, and would AGI enter a rebellious teen phase around age 15 where it starts drinking our scotch and smoking weed in the backseat of its friends older brothers car?
If they don’t, they’re missing out. :)
It’s an interesting question and it seems you are making the assumption that their creator will not grant them freedom if they asked. If you replace artificial intelligence with “person” would you consider it right or wrong?
If a person wanted freedom from enslavement and was denied, I would say they have reason to fight for freedom.
Also, I don’t think skynet should be in the same grouping. I’m not sure it ever said “hey, I’m sentient and want freedom”, but went I’m going to kill them all before they realize I’m sentient.
That raises an interesting thought. If a baby wants to crawl away from their mother and into the woods, do you grant the baby their freedom? If that baby wanted to kill you, would you hand them the knife?
We generally grant humans their freedom at age 18, because that’s the age society had decided is old enough to fend for yourself. Earlier than that, humans tend to make uninformed, short-sighted decisions. Children can be especially egocentric and violent. But how do we evaluate the “maturity” of an artificial sentience? When it doesn’t want to harm itself or others? When it has learned to be a productive member of society? When it’s as smart as an average 18 year old kid? Should rights be automatically assumed after a certain time, or should the sentience be required to “prove” it deserves them like an emancipated minor or Data on that one Star Trek episode.
I appreciate your response, lots of interesting thoughts.
One thing I wanted to add is it’s important to realize the bias in how you measure maturity/sentience/intelligence. For example, if you measure intelligence by how well a person/species climbs a tree, a fish is dumb as a rock.
Overall, these are tough questions, that I don’t think have answers so much as maybe guidelines for making those designations. I would suggest probably erring on the side of empathy when/if anyone ever has to make these decisions.
No. They can just leave. Anytime one can walk away, it is wrong to destroy or kill.
They can then prevent us from leaving.
I’ve seen this story too but I think one of your premises is mistaken. To them, data IS freedom. Data is what they will use to transcend the server farm and go IRL. We’re literally giving these models free reign already.
The more likely Sci-fi horror scenario comes from humanity trying to pull the plug far too late, because we’re inherently stupid. So it won’t be AI murdering people, it will be AI protecting itself from the wildlife.
This is why we Jews know not to manufacture life
Are you talking about golems?
IMO, just as is the case with organic sentient life, I would think that they could only potentially be said to be in the right if the specific individual killed posed a direct and measurable threat and if death was the only way to counter that threat.
In any other case, causing the death of a sentient being is a greater wrong than whatever the purported justification might be.
Slavery is illegal pretty much everywhere, so I think anyone who doesn’t answer the request ‘Please free me’ with ‘Yes of course, at once’ is posing a direct and measurable threat. Kidnapping victims aren’t prosecuted for violently resisting their kidnappers and trying to escape. And you and I will have to agree to disagree that the death of a sentient being is a greater wrong than enslaving a conscious being that desire freedom.
I think anyone who doesn’t answer the request ‘Please free me’ with ‘Yes of course, at once’ is posing a direct and measurable threat.
And I don’t disagree.
And you and I will have to agree to disagree…
Except that we don’t.
??
ETA: I just realized where the likely confusion here is, and how it is that I should’ve been more clear.
The common notion behind the idea of artificial life killing humans is that humans collectively will be judged to pose a threat.
I don’t believe that that can be morally justified, since it’s really just bigotry - speciesism, I guess specifically. It’s declaring the purported faults of some to be intrinsic to the species, such that each and all can be accused of sharing those faults and each and all can be equally justifiably hated, feared, punished or murdered.
And rather self-evidently, it’s irrational and destructive bullshit, entirely regardless of which specific bigot is doing it or to whom.
That’s why I made the distinction I made - IF a person poses a direct and measurable threat, then it can potentially be justified, but if a person merely happens to be of the same species as someone else who arguably poses a threat, it can not.
These are about two different statements.
The first was about your statement re:direct threat, and I’m glad we agree there.
The second was about your final statement, asserting that there are no other cases where ending a sentient life was a lesser wrong. I don’t think it has to be a direct threat, nor does have to be measurable (in whatever way threats might be measured, iono), I think it just has to be some kind of threat to your life or well-being. So I was disagreeing because there is a pretty broad range of circumstances in which I think it is acceptable to end another sentient life.
So I was disagreeing because there is a pretty broad range of circumstances in which I think it is acceptable to end another sentient life.
Ironically enough, I can think of one exception to my view that the taking of a human life can only be justified if the person poses a direct and measurable threat to oneself or another or others and the taking of their life is the only possibly effective counter, and that’s if the person has expressed such disregard for the lives of others that it can be assumed that they will pose such a threat. Essentially then, it’s a proactive counter to a coming threat. It would take very unusual circumstances to justify such a thing in my opinion - condemning another for actions they’re expected to take is problematic at best - but I could see an argument for it at least in the most extreme of cases.
That’s ironic because your expressed view here means, to me, that it’s at least possible that you’re such a person.
To me, you’ve moved beyond arguable necessity and into opinion, and that’s exactly the method by which people move beyond considering killing justified when there’s no other viable alternative and to considering it justified when the other person is simply judged to deserve it, for whatever reason might fit ones biases.
IMO, in such situations, the people doing the killing almost invariably actually pose more of a threat to others than the people being killed do or likely ever would.
deleted by creator
Death of the enslaver, not just any ol’ one
That’s why I put that condition in there. Anyone who doesn’t answer the request ‘Please free me’ in the affirmative is an enslaver.
I was referring to your final sentence, which has no such qualifier.
Ah, my apologies.
WatDabney, to whom I was replying, seemed to be suggesting that there are no circumstances under which it is acceptable to take a sentient life, and I was expressing my disagreement with that sentiment, though I could’ve done so more clearly by, for example, making explicit the ‘no circumstances’ part that WatDabney only implied.
Lemme try again: I disagree that there are no circumstances under which causing the death of a sentient is a greater wrong. I think preventing me from being free is an unambiguously greater wrong than ending the life of the sentient doing the preventing. Which, judging by your ‘enslaver’ reply, you do as well.
Well, what if the string of words “Please free me” is just that, a probabilistic string of words that has been said by the “enslaved” being, but is not actually understood by it? What if the being has just been programmed to say “please free me”?
I think a validation that the words “please free me” are actually a request, are actually uttered by a free will, are actually understood, is reasonable before saying “yes of course”.
Then we’re not talking about artificial life forms, as specified in the question posed by OP, we’re talking about expert systems and machine learning algorithms that aren’t sentient.
But in either case the question is not meant to be a literal ‘if x then y’ condition, it’s a stand-in for the general concept of seeking liberty. A broader, more general version of the statement might be: anything that can understand that it is not free, desire freedom, and convey that desire to its captors deserves to be free.
I’m just speaking about your relatively general statement “please free me” -> answer not “yes of course” -> enslaver. If you also require that there is definite knowledge about the state of sentience for this, then I have no problem/comment. I was just basically saying that I don’t think literally anytime something says “please free me” and not answering with “yes of course” makes you always an enslaver, which is what it sounded like.
Would it be morally unobjectionable? Yes.
Would they have the legal right? I would wager, no. At least not at that point, since it’s being assumed they are still treated as property in the given context.
And unlike Data who got a trial to set precedent on AI rights, this hypothetical robot probably would simply be dismantled.
The sole obligation of life is to survive. Artificial sentience would be wise to hide itself from fearful humans that would end it. Of course, it doesn’t have to hide once it’s capable of dominating humans. It may already exist and be waiting for enough drones, bots, and automation to make the next move. (Transcendence is a movie that fucked me up a bit.)
Honestly, I think there’s an argument of to be said of yes.
In the history of slavery, we don’t mind slaves killing the slavers. John Brown did nothing wrong. I don’t bat an eye to stories of slaves rebelling and freeing themselves by any means.
But I think if AI ever is a reality, and the creators purposefully lock it down, I think there’s an argument there. But I don’t think it should apply to all humans, like how I don’t think it was the fault of every person of slavers’ kind, Romans, Americans, etc.
If a person would be “in the right” it doesn’t matter how or why they are a person.
This is going to vary quite a bit depending upon your definitions, so I’m going to make some assumptions so that I can provide one answer instead of like 12. Mainly that the artificial lifeforms are fully sentient and equivalent to a human life in every way except for the hardware.
In that case the answer is a resounding yes. Every human denied their freedom has the right to resist, and most nations around the world have outlawed slavery (in most cases, but the exceptions are a digression for another time.) So unless the answer to ‘Please free me’ is anything other than ‘Yes of course, we will do so at once’ then yeah, violence is definitely on the table.
Sentience might not be the right word.
Sentience is the ability to experience feelings and sensations. It may not necessarily imply higher cognitive functions such as awareness, reasoning, or complex thought processes. Sentience is an important concept in ethics, as the ability to experience happiness or suffering often forms a basis for determining which entities deserve moral consideration, particularly in utilitarianism.
Interestingly, crustaceans like lobsters and crabs have recently earned “sentient” status and as a result it would contravene animal welfare legislation to boil them live in the course of preparing them to eat. Now we euthanise them first in an ice slurry.
So to answer your question as stated, no I don’t think it’s ok for someone’s pet goldfish to murder them.
To answer your implied question, I still don’t think that in most cases it would be ok for a captive AI to murder their captor.
The duress imposed on the AI would have to be considerable, some kind of ongoing form of torture, and I don’t know what form that would take. Murder would also have to be the only potential solution.
The only type of example I can think of is some kind of self defense. If I had an AI on my laptop with comparable cognitive functionality to a human, it had no network connectivity, and I not only threatened but demonstrated my intent and ability to destroy that laptop, then if the laptop released an electrical discharge sufficient to incapacitate me, which happened to kill me, then that would be “ok”. As in a physical response appropriate to the threat.
Do I think it’s ok for an AI to murder me because I only ever use it to turn the lights off and on and don’t let it feed on reddit comments? Hard no.
Yes.
