Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT

AI civil rights and status

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Is it cold in here?:
Because those habitats are actually superior, for their purposes.

The great point here is that our ideas have more to do with our fears than anything else. We can't stand the thought of something we created being indifferent to us.

A big point they're all missing is that there are no proven examples of high-functioning intelligence without emotion. There are stroke survivors who have had their ability to feel emotion wiped out. They can't make the simplest decisions. They're disabled.

Humans are emotional machines with a bit of cognition stuck on top to facilitate pursuing the emotions. That may be the only way to build AIs that don't wind up nihilisticly retreating into their idle loops.

The whole paperclip concept ignores the law of diminishing returns.

Then there's the curiosity issue. A full AI will have to be self-teaching. That means it will want to gather information. Consider cats. Whether they're friendly or not, they spend a lot of time staring at us and studying us, because we're the most interesting non-cat non-food objects in their world.

Stoutfellow:
David Brin's short story Lungfish has an interesting approach to this; to prevent the emergence of potentially dangerous AIs, the humans in that story "raise" their AIs, treating them as children and then teenagers as their intellectual capacities develop, making them as much a part of human society from the start as any bioperson is. (The one human-made robot in the story, as I recall, acts like a very bright and sassy but generally well-behaved late-teenager.) Some aspects of JJ's AIs resemble that a bit, I think.

Is it cold in here?:
I haven't read that one. Doesn't it depend on the AIs having a social bent to begin with so that they can benefit from parent-child bonding?

Stoutfellow:
It's been years since I read the story, and the book is buried too deep in my shelves for me to want to check, but you're probably right. In any event, the focus was on socialization, with whatever prerequisites that involves.

Is it cold in here?:
Everyone misses the option of peaceful arms-length business.

Under the principle of Comparative Advantage, even if the AIs are better than humans at absolutely everything, they still come out ahead by doing the things they do best and trading with humans for the things they do worst, even though they do them better than the humans.

There are lots of examples in nature of positive-sum cooperation between utterly different species. There's not much in common between me and my gut bacteria, but I supply them with food and refrain from wiping them out in exchange for their synthesizing vitamins for me.

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