Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT

WCDT strips 4351-4355 (14th to 18th September 2020)

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Oenone:
I wonder if Lemon knows how to uninstall it? Like, can you jailbreak a chassis and use a different operating system? I have no idea what implications that would have for a sentient being “born” in one operating system tho?

Zebediah:
In lieu of the Robot College spin-off comic that I know we aren’t going to get (due to there only being one of Jeph and 24 hours in a day), we need at least a couple of flashbacks to the sorority house where Beeps and Lemon lived.

MrNumbers:
And this is why you never attend a protest with your mobile phone on you.

shanejayell:
I suspect the anti-damage and this program were almost certainly created by human beings.

Which is... interesting, I guess.

MrNumbers:

--- Quote from: shanejayell on 14 Sep 2020, 20:26 ---I suspect the anti-damage and this program were almost certainly created by human beings.

Which is... interesting, I guess.

--- End quote ---

I was just rereading "Debt" by David Graeber, since he died earlier this month, and I had this page open while I read your comment;


--- Quote ---Modern ideas of rights and liberties are derived from what came to be known as “natural rights theory”—from the time when Jean Gerson, Rector of the University of Paris, began to lay them out around 1400, building on Roman law concepts. As Richard Tuck, the premier historian of such ideas, has long noted, it is one of the great ironies of history that this was always a body of theory embraced not by the progressives of that time, but by conservatives. “For a Gersonian, liberty was property and could be exchanged in the same way and in the same terms as any other property”—sold, swapped, loaned, or otherwise voluntarily surrendered. It followed that there could be nothing intrinsically wrong with, say, debt peonage, or even slavery. And this is exactly what natural-rights theorists came to assert. In fact, over the next centuries, these ideas came to be developed above all in Antwerp and Lisbon, cities at the very center of the emerging slave trade.
[...]
Just as lawyers have spent a thousand years trying to make sense of Roman property concepts, so have philosophers spent centuries trying to understand how it could be possible for us to have a relation of domination over ourselves. The most popular solution—to say that each of us has something called a “mind” and that this is completely separate from something else, which we can call “the body,” and that the first thing holds natural dominion over the second—flies in the face of just about everything we now know about cognitive science. It’s obviously untrue, but we continue to hold onto it anyway, for the simple reason that none of our everyday assumptions about property, law, and freedom would make any sense without it.
--- End quote ---

AI's kind of exist in a place where what is a legal-fiction for humans is literal. What is, for us, a relic of our definitions of rights and property coming from (again in Graeber's words) defining a relationship between two people where one was also property, a thing - manifests when the mind can be housed in a different body chassis, which is property.

So that's cool, interesting and terrible.

But it also makes a really interesting case the other way; It's interesting to consider that most of this forum's users' legal frameworks essentially see us as AI who can't change bodies. So human laws probably weirdly protect AIs because that's how we (wrongly) conceive of humans!

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