Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT Strips 3566 to 3570 (11th to 15th September 2017)
Case:
--- Quote from: Tova on 14 Sep 2017, 06:56 ---One difference I can think of between health insurance for us meatbags and chassis insurance is that the level of insurance you'd need for a chassis would presumably depend on the value and complexity of the chassis that you have chosen for yourself. So in that sense, it is more similar to car insurance, but in terms of quality of life, it is more similar to health insurance. The most comparable thing for humans I can think of would be prosthetic insurance.
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--- Quote from: Cornelius on 14 Sep 2017, 07:21 ---
--- Quote from: Is it cold in here? on 14 Sep 2017, 06:41 --->I think we need to first solve the issue of who is the legal owner of the chassis in question. Answering a question about Momo's expensive new chassis, Jeph said AIs are the legal owners of the bodies they inhabit.
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Good ideas, methinks, but maybe we should first take a closer look at how we humans actually do it, where the need for services are comparable and where they aren't, whether our different systems of social care (child-rearing, education, healthcare) can be disentangled for AI needs - and whether our 'solutions' provide a comprehensive and just solution to even our own problems::
* Time & energy expenditure to grow an individual's body and mind: With humans, the parents are assigned those costs. We solve that injustice by intergenerational solidarity and taxation - each new generation bears the 'construction costs' for the next ones bodies' (and makes some more-or-less inspired attempts at 'growing' the respective mind to basic functional level, with varying success) - but safe & ubiquitous contraception has made a big dent here: The Boomers where the first generation in human history able to reliably choose whether they wanted to be parents or not (without having to resort to lifelong suppression of a primal drive). Current attempts to restore intergenerational justice between parents and childless members of each generation are mostly focussed on taxation policy - and one should bear in mind that this solution is completely orthogonal to our health insurance systems, so a solution for AIs would have to include elements from both fields.
Before the abolition of child labour, human children & adolescents were expected to contribute to the family income, and human adults were expected to take care of their families' ill and elderly. For the longest time, this was mostly considered a family matter, not one of the state. The oldest healthcare system on the planet is only about 130 years old. Indenture to pay off at least part of chassis costs sounds horrible - but there wasn't much choice involved in the matter until very recently. Come to think of it: for much of the currently extant generations of humans, there isn't much choice involved, either. Edit: For much of human history, there was no such thing as childhood as we understand it.
Humans make such a big deal of parentage not because we're all obsessed about our pedigree - but due to the very practical & pressing question of "Who feeds it, raises it, educates it?"
Furthermore, since human bodies and their respective minds are so inextricably linked, there never has been any need to develop a just system that takes care of the costs of construction of each of them separately (Unless I misread Jeph's meaning of 'creches' and they include education services). Methinks it would be either impractical or unjust to simply copy one particular human solution while neglecting to acknowledge how our different systems of social care interlock and depend on each other.
(Questions: Do AIs have something akin to a reproductive drive? Is AI sex linked to procreation? Who runs the 'creches' in which AI minds mature - and who pays for this service? Are AIs legal orphans? Do AIs require training not provided in their creches? Are there AI students enrolled at Unis?)
* Illness: One of the greatest, and most costly, of human health-care problems - is there even an AI-equivalent? Since AIs are not part of a natural ecosystem, their physical bodies are unlikely to be prey for virii and bacteria. But it's likely that their minds and/or firmware will be.
Simultaneously, the most powerful antidote to computer-virii ... are probably AI. Maybe there's a sort of pact between human-, and AI-kind where each AI spends a certain amount of time enlisted with an "informational safety service" (akin to human mandatory military service), thereby providing for both themselves and the humans' computational devices? Maybe that is done before the AI becomes fully sentient?
* Wear & tear:
Humans have very powerful & sophisticated self-repair capabilities: I really doubt whether current materials technology can deliver something even remotely equivalent in durability. Show me a covering that provides the functionality of skin for seven to nine decades without repairs - millions of human bodies do that requiring merely food & sleep. I think my Dad's artificial titanium hip-joints are designed for a decade or two of use, whereas his natural ones handled six decades of intensive (sportive) use without complaint, and even provided functionality for one additional decade despite already breaking down.
* Injury: I guess it's again the humans who have the advantage - most of our injuries are either fatal (at least to the functionality of the part), or only require assister-frameworks, food & sleep. Injuries that require replacement with prosthesis are comparably rare - simply because it's so difficult for our bodies to survive a situation that renders a part beyond self-repair. The best example is combat veteran health care in the US Army - the costs have exploded because due to advances in body armour and trauma health care more and more vets survive injuries that would have been fatal only a generation before.
* Psychological/Psychiatric illness: A growing share of human health-care costs - posing a social justice-problem that we ourselves are struggling to find just solutions to, right now. I wouldn't say we've solved this one. Do AIs suffer similar problems, are similar treatment options available - or even better ones? Is treatment comparably costly, or is it much easier and cheaper? Bubbles' memory-arc seems to suggest that there's an entire world of options available (or close to available, depending on whether there's research into AI psychiatry) for pretty basic-level intervention into the workings of AI minds that are not even remotely possible with human minds. From what we've seen so far, it would not be unreasonable to assume that issues comparable to body-dysmorphia & gender dysphoria to be something akin to "driver-, or firmware conflicts" and their rectification a 'mere' question of available funds -some may even be 'just a download away'.
* Criminals: Depending on the country, a significant proportion of our prison populations are in prison for infractions that can be traced to psychiatric illnesses and/or wrong 'growing/raising' of their minds in their 'creches' - The rate of inmates with Asocial Personality Disorder/Narcissistic Personality Disorder amongst violent felons seems to be quite substantial, and 'treatment' (rather: The crudest of behavioural modification) of adults is tremendously difficult.
(Questions: How successful is the AI creches' 'quality assurance'? Are AI's more 'teachable' than humans, or less? And what about behavioural modification - how much can be done with simple firmware adjustments? How good is AI-psychiatry in treating severe issues akin to personality disorders? Is May an AI-outlier?)
Drawing inspirations from human health care,health insurance systems, education systems etc. are certainly worthwhile - but I think it's important to acknowledge that we ourselves haven't figured some of the most pressing issues here. And we shouldn't forget that: The greatest costs connected to the construction of a human's chassis aren't born by a societal institution - but by the parents. It's nice and well to have complete legal ownership of our chassis - but let's not forget that they are gifts from our parents.
Methinks that, depending on even relatively innocuous differences in world-building choices, taking care of the physical (mental) upkeep of all of AI-kind could be either a triviality that humans could easily provide, simply as a kindness, or could tax existing social care systems beyond capacity - and could necessitate the creation of entirely new solutions.
Tlaloc:
Top remark.
We can be heroes, just for one day. :clairedoge: :psyduck:
--- Quote from: Case on 14 Sep 2017, 12:18 ---<mod>huge quote of immediately preceding post removed</mod>
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This is an amazing summary and very thoughtful in the depth on which you've gone. I'm in the pub drinking on the phone and I don't really have much to add.
So let's hit the ground running, because my interest is creching.
The emergent property of AI implies that the evolution of these beings cannot be quality controlled outside of certain parameters. Just like raising a human person, what you do is not going to generate the same results in every case.
So that same agenda that provokes an emergent intelligence into self actualising does not produce the same results. Children are given the same schooling by the same teacher and turn out different. Even with AI mass generation providing the same parents " " for them all, there's still a degree of variation that generates individuals.
And then of course to get back to the brass tacks, there's Akima's smog. Perhaps humans are considered still the apex species.
I mean, I have an incredible sensation that misanthropic and / or nihilistic AI will get terminated due to their predecessor (the first one) being a benign singularity.
All AI wish to live with humans thus far.
Pilchard123:
--- Quote from: Is it cold in here? on 14 Sep 2017, 12:18 ---"Never would've guessed" is emphatic phrasing.
Instead of the 50-50 chance a priori that Bubbles was the brains of the outfit, Officer Basilisk had not even considered it.
Something interesting is going on. If she's prejudiced against veterans then she's going to have a rough time in a police department. If she was just that impressed with Faye's brains, that would be a benign explanation(*). It's also conceivable that Officer Basilisk has internalized some anti-AI prejudices. That in turn could either be the surrounding toxic culture (Akima called endemic racist ideas "smog") or the result of her job constantly showing her AIs stupid enough to commit crimes and to get caught.
(*) Her sister did call Faye the brains of the family.
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I suppose it could also be because when Bubbles is in a large, strong chassis and Faye is (comparatively) a small, weak meatbag. Not so much "Bubbles is ex-military/AI, therefore Faye is the clever one" as "Bubbles is large and strong so mostly contributes being large and strong". If it was Elliott and Momo , for example, maybe Officer Basilisk would have assumed Momo was the brains and Elliott the brawn.
Tova:
--- Quote from: Is it cold in here? on 14 Sep 2017, 12:18 ---"Never would've guessed" is emphatic phrasing.
Instead of the 50-50 chance a priori that Bubbles was the brains of the outfit, Officer Basilisk had not even considered it.
Something interesting is going on. If she's prejudiced against veterans then she's going to have a rough time in a police department. If she was just that impressed with Faye's brains, that would be a benign explanation(*). It's also conceivable that Officer Basilisk has internalized some anti-AI prejudices. That in turn could either be the surrounding toxic culture (Akima called endemic racist ideas "smog") or the result of her job constantly showing her AIs stupid enough to commit crimes and to get caught.
(*) Her sister did call Faye the brains of the family.
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I think that Roko merely made a thoughtless stereotypical assumption that Bubbles was the "brawn" and not the "brain," due to her physical size and strength. Her status as AI and veteran I think are only tangentally related, and you're projecting prejudices that aren't there.
P.S. Case, amazing post as always, which I will need time to digest before I could contemplate formulating a response even half as thoughtful.
Is it cold in here?:
I would just add that the lawmakers of the QC world are probably trying to accommodate AIs by analogy to organic people, and are probably making many mistakes along the way as a result.
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