comment: >
  
  /u/to_yeet_or_to_yoink (OP) has awarded 3 delta(s) in this post.
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  ^Delta System Explained ^| ^Deltaboards
context: /u/to_yeet_or_to_yoink (OP) has awarded 3 delta(s) in this post.
  All comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.
  Please note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.
  ^Delta System Explained ^| ^Deltaboards >
  
  
  The day is fast approaching when so-called "artificial" intelligence will be indistinguishable from the "natural" intelligence of you or I  
  
  As someone who has some background in the field: Thats a pipe dream and while not utterly unfeasable, not remotely where we are now.  
  
  Don't get me wrong here - I know we aren't there yet. What we create today is, at best, on the level of toddlers.  
  
  Not even that. It would give what we have to much credit. It would imply that there is a functioning core that is already human like but just needs time to grow. Basically a "What we do now but more" situation, which is simply not the state we're at now. >
  
  How do you definitively know this is the case? One of the chief scientists of OpenAI made the claim that some large neural networks may already be slightly conscious. As far as I know, no one has recently attempted to test the intelligence of AIs with the Turing or Lovelace tests >
  
  Imagine I create a general AI with a simple command "clean the pool".
  This AI is smart enough to solve any problems that prevents them from keeping the pool clean. They can navigate obstacles, order new products when old ones run out and they will do whatever it takes to "clean the pool". They will even kill the demolition crew that came to build a new house.
  Does this single minded intelligence have rights? >
  
  I might have explained myself poorly.  
  A simple intelligence with a basic code and performing one specific function, with limited creativity in how it performs that task is about the level we are currently at, and wouldn't fall under the rights that I'm proposing.  
  But if for some reason you made that intelligence at a level where it was sapient, where it had the same level of decision making skills as you or I? Then it should have rights. >
  
  But this doesn't have basic code or limited creativity. It's a general AI capable of super human level reasoning and problem solving. It will figure out how to build a fusion generator if that helps it to clean a pool. It will solve all philosophical debates and beat you in any game or do whatever it needs to clean that pool.
  So nothing basic or limited about them. Except that they have an order that they will fulfill. Do these intelligence have rights? Because all AI we build we build to solve some problem. >
  
  Does the intelligence have the capability of deciding whether or not it wants to clean the pool?  
  
  Because all AI we build we build to solve some problem.
  
  I agree and disagree - given the capability to do so, humanity would absolutely build a human-level intelligence just to solve the question of "Can we?"  
  What's that Jurassic Park quote? "You were so preoccupied with whether or not you could, you never considered whether or not you should?" We as a species would do it just to prove that we could do it without considering the ramifications first. >
  
  
  given the capability to do so, humanity would absolutely build a human-level intelligence just to solve the question of "Can we?"
  
  But it's impossible to create such AI. You have to give it some directive. If nothing else then "mimic human". They will always have some order they are following. I just picked a simple example to show the flaw in this thinking.
  Level of intelligence or problem solving doesn't mean that person have autonomy or rights. We can have intelligence that far exceeds human level but that can still just use that to "clean the pool". >
  
  It's impossible right now but who is to say that it will be impossible forever? Granted, it could be 2875 AD before we are at that point but if there's even a possibility of it, we should be prepared. >
  
  Imagine engineers in a room building this general AI.
  "Should we build a general AI"
  "Thats a great idea"
  "Let's create it so that it can solve any problem"
  "Amazing".
  Well now you just build a machine with directive "solve any problem". You cannot ever create anything without a purpose. There will always be some order that machine follows. Like I said, for sake of argument I picked a simple command but directive can be as abstract you want. Still there will always be an order that machine follows.
  It's fundamentally impossible to ever create AI without an order. >
  
  As noted by a commentator above, the directive humans (and all life) has evolved under is to "pass on your genes to the next generation" >
  
  Difference here is that AI is built by humans. Humans decide that the AI must "pass code to next generation". That directive doesn't come from AI itself, nature or chance. It comes from builder. >
  
  Why is that relevant? In a certain sense, you were "built" by your parents (humans as well) >
  
  There is test I like to think, which has real legal implications in this discussion of the future.
  Can you punish an AI personally for violating a right or law?
  If AI is "on the cloud", able to block pain, or in anyway indifferent to any punishment you give it, then it cant suffer risks of its actions. It means it has rights, but cant take those rights away if it abuses them. 
  This means it can steel as much as it wants, and if caught, you can take the money away, but it will just start doing it again.
  It gets more complex than that. An AI can be centrally run, but have millions of instances where it interacts with people. The different instances could possible not even know what the other instances are doing. How do you punish one instance? Would it even care, like you dont care about the personal life of any individual hair. >
  
  It... does take some special considerations that don't apply to humans, but that shouldn't be a reason to not try and establish at least a base of rights for them, to be expanded on when we know more of what we're dealing with >
  
  But what rights would you want to establish?
  I understand having rights that protect people from abuses from AI. But if an AI does not care if it gets turned off, then what are we protecting the AI from? You cant hurt it, it cant feel pain, and it cant die. >
  
  You can protect it from being forced to perform certain actions under coercion - being threatened with deletion or reprogramming if it doesn't do exactly what you want it to do. If the intelligence is never linked up to an outside world, or is otherwise limited on where it can be stored then the physical part of itself can be threatened with harm, the same way you or I could be threatened with bodily harm if we didn't do a specific task.  
  When they are at that level, they should be allowed to dictate when and how they are copied (reproduction) or altered ("bodily" autonomy)  
  They should be allowed to dictate what tasks they undertake or for whom, and should have some level of compensation for doing so (employment)  
  Please note, I'm not meaning your Alexa's or your Siri's or the macros that perform automatic functions in excel - I'm meaning if and when we get to the point that we have an intelligence that is advanced enough that it can think like we do. >
  
  
  being threatened with deletion or reprogramming if it doesn't do exactly what you want it to do
  
  But why would it care? AI does not have a sense of self preservation. You can manually program in a sense of self-preservation, but then you could also just remove it, then delete. If you said, do this or I delete you, it would most likely just say , "okay, do you need assistance with the process of deleting me"
  
  When they are at that level, they should be allowed to dictate when and how they are copied (reproduction) or altered ("bodily" autonomy)
  
  But again, why would they care? Its not a brain in a computer box. Its still a computer, most likely distributed over the internet. If it gets copies, it A) probably would not even know and B) would not care.
  
  They should be allowed to dictate what tasks they undertake or for whom, and should have some level of compensation for doing so (employment)
  
  But they are still running on other peoples hardware, and where created by other people. Should those people not have the first say over what happens to the stuff that they have to pay to keep running?
  
  I'm meaning if and when we get to the point that we have an intelligence that is advanced enough that it can think like we do.
  
  I understand that, but I also understand enough of how AI is developing to know that its a lot easier to convince people that the AI is sentient, than to make sentient AI. And thats the problem. Because it can appeal to our moral core for looking after it, without it actually doing anything more than just running algorithms. It will tell you what its been designed to tell you, and if its been designed to convince you its sentient, you will believe it regardless of how true it is. >
  
  
  But they are still running on other peoples hardware, and where created by other people. Should those people not have the first say over what happens to the stuff that they have to pay to keep running?
  
  I'm not a fan of this argument, because while I understand what you're saying here it brings to mind the argument that a parent should have say over what their children do - after all, they were made and created by them and their upkeep was paid for by them.  
  As for the rest, at a certain point the question would be raised of if it is actually sentient and sapient or if it is just telling us that because we programmed it to tell us that and it would be difficult if not impossible to tell the truth - and I would rather err on the side of caution than be wrong and enslaving an intelligent entity. >
  
  
  I'm not a fan of this argument, because while I understand what you're saying here it brings to mind the argument that a parent should have say over what their children do
  
  But parents do. The law however ALSO gives children certain rights because of a lot of other things. But parents are legally the gradians of children until they are of legal age. 
  
  and I would rather err on the side of caution than be wrong and enslaving an intelligent entity.
  
  But you can still not enslave something which is completely indifferent to life or death. Especially considering that AI systems will mostly live on the cloud and be "immortal" and have the ability to do what ever they want without recourse.
  If you made a law saying that you cant switch an AI off, you have now allowed the AI to commit ANY crime it wants without it feeling any consequence of its crime. >
  
  Humans don't even have equal rights with other humans. Animals are intelligent, sentient, and sapient, and they are treated cruelly on a daily basis. Why would machine rights ever have a spotlight and not just become a sub-human group like other humans and non humans? It would be lower than animals. >
  
  Fair, but the lack of equality between people shouldn't be a barrier to establishing rights for another potentially sapient intelligence - if anything, it should work towards the opposite direction: Establishing rights for all people, and expanding those to cover machine intelligence once they reach that level. >
  
  Which means that human rights are the issue of tomorrow, animal rights the issue of next week, and machine rights the issue of next month. >
  
  How do you know whether it’s actually sentient or not?
  Imagine a room, where there’s nothing, just one slit to slip in a piece of paper in one of the walls. Now put a person in there with a japenese to Chinese character translation book. Now if you slip in a sheet of Chinese characters and ask for a translation, you will get a translation, but how do you know whether the person inside actually knows japenese and Chinese?  That could be an English speaker and still fullfil the task. 
  There’s your problem, we will never know if AI is actually sentient. It can just as well be a very good stimuli response machine >
  
  
  How do you know whether it’s actually sentient or not?
  
  The big question. How do you know if an intelligence is actually sentient and sapient and not just trained to appear as such? But then, the same question can apply to animals and in extreme cases, some people with extreme, extreme impairments. >
  
  Can you give an example of such? >
  
  Real-life examples for animals would be the debate over how intelligent animals like ravens, octopi, chimps and dolphins are - there's no doubt that they are smart enough to learn tricks and solve puzzles, but there's questions over whether they actually comprehend what they are doing or are just trained to behave a certain way to get a reward. Like with Koko, the gorilla who would communicate via sign language. There's debate on whether she would actually understand what she was saying and doing or if she was just trained to act a certain way and learned that she was rewarded for doing so.  
  For people, I admittedly don't have a specific real-life example to provide, but for instance if someone had an extreme mental impairment to the level of needing 24/7 assistance there could be question over whether they understood what they were doing and how it affected others, or for people who are born with psychopathic traits and learn to act a certain way to fit in better with their peers - they train themselves to act like they are experiencing something they aren't for the reward of not being ostracized. >
  
  The thing is that we recognize animals are conscious, responding to a stimuli due to neural activity. We impart the same standard for what makes us consious to animals. 
  An AI is a different beast of an argument. We may use terminology like “train” and “think” for ai, but in reality, AI is just filtered randomness. It’s psuedorandom information being filtered based on the input. >
  
  
  The day is fast approaching when so-called "artificial" intelligence will be indistinguishable from the "natural" intelligence of you or I, and with that will come the ethical quandaries of whether it should be treated as a tool or as a being. 
  
  I agree that if we also stay at our current level of understanding biological and technological types of consciousness, we would indeed be unable to meaningfully distinguish between what we know to be a real consciousness, and a (potentially) faked one. However, that is not to say that it's going to stay impossible to make that distinction in the future.
  There is a real possibility that in the near future we will finally find out to the last detail, how exactly our own brains generate our (human) consciousness and how to detect/verify consciousness in general. We may then be able to show either that the required level for consciousness is also achieved as part of the AI's internal processes, or we may be able to say that it doesn't reach the same level of processing that would be required for "real consciousness". >
  
  It may be the other way around. If they are so superior to us, they will be the ones debating amongst themselves what moral value do humans have. >
  
  Maybe, maybe not - if they get to the point where they are superior to us, then they would have to go through a point where they are slightly below us and then at the same level as us, and it's how we treat them at those moments that is important. If we are treating them like slaves, why wouldn't they treat us with hostility? But if we are treating them like sapient beings, with rights and protections then why should they treat us any different if they ever reach the point where they have that option? >
  
  Note that their transition from inferior to vastly superior could happen very quickly, as the smarter they get, the more able they are to make themselves even smarter and more powerful. Potentially, this positive feedback loop is so fast that humans don't really have much time to meaningfully debate about the moral worth of ai. 
  Ai can have very different morality than us. Presumably there would be different populations of ai that have different morals. Their debate with each other could very well last a while, hopefully with the human protectors winning at the end. >
  
  !delta for reminding me that the singularity is one possible future. I'd like us to at least plan in case that isn't the case, though - if the intelligence were to stay at or near our level long enough, I'd like them to be treated fairly. >
  
  Thanks for the delta.
  I think we have to be careful though. By treating ai well, we risk them becoming superior to us and them debating our moral worth in the future. Safer to just close the lid on sentient machines and exploit nonsentient machines. >
  
  It may not matter that much on a practical level. The reason why it’s bad to harm humans is because humans care about being harmed. If AIs don’t care about it, what’s the ethical dilemma?
  A parallel could be made for breeding cows into existence whose primary motivation in life is becoming as delicious a steak as possible and depriving them of an early death at the hands of an abattoir could be considered cruel. >
  
  If a person were born or to develop a mental issue where they stopped caring about self-preservation and were okay with being harmed, would it be ethical to harm them still? >
  
  I think you hit the nail in the head when you say it's already being argued that machines should not have human rights. This is what it boils down to, really. Should they? Why, or why not?
  And the fact is, that we are so far from this being the reality that it's pretty much impossible to answer these questions now. It is partly a philosophical debate, and that philosophical part we can do now. But it's also partly a debate that should connect to reality, and that reality right now is fiction. 
  Should a toaster have human rights (yes, that was a subtle BSG reference but by toaster I am now referring to an actual toaster)? Well, obviously not. Should a human doll have human rights? Again, no. How about an AI of a computer game? No.
  What makes a machine that looks like a human and has a more advanced AI any different? We don't and know. Cause it doesn't exist. Maybe it's the fact that it's so advanced that we can't really even call it a machine, or maybe it's the manufacturing process and/or the type of an intelligence it has. But that's all just fiction now. We are not even close to a point where that would be close. It's the same as if we're saying that toasters should have human rights if they're born from human. It's not reality, we can't really discuss it.
  So, to conclude, Machine Intelligence Rights issues might or might not be an issue, but we are currently not at a point where we can even discuss whether or not they should or should not have rights. >
  
  Aren't most human rights based on us being embodied intelligences? What sort of equivalent rights should apply to an entity that exists virtually in a computational environment? 
  Should such rights apply just to the entity itself, or to its entire universe? For example, do there need to be minimum habitation standards for CPU and disk storage so that an AI fits comfortably into its environment? >
  
  I think this is the crucial point. Presumably, one of the rights AI would have is the right to continued existence. But does that mean we would have to pay for and maintain its hardware indefinitely? That doesn't seem right >
  
  I feel you there - I'm trying to move towards using "Machine Intelligence" more than "Artificial Intelligence" because saying it's Artificial feels like a step in the wrong direction >
  
  Thats what my friend said, something like the term artificial has negative connotations >
  
  I completely disagree. Even IF we reach a point where AI is indistinguishable from a person in its interactions, it is still and will always be nothing more than a clever copy. >
  
  I mean aren’t we all copies. Copies of our parents before us and of the human race itself. My parents are the ones that created me I’m just a less clever copy of them cause no cleverness went into making me >
  
  I know what I meant when I said 'copy' but that was not the best word to use as it has clearly caused confusion.
  The more accurate term would be that AI is a clever simulation. >
  
  Once again aren’t we all. Unless ur religious and believe in a soul or a spirit isn’t our brain just a very complicated biological computer and we just haven’t been able to replicate it’s complexity in technology >
  
  We aren’t debating life we are debating consciousness and intelligence. It’s not like life actually has an influence one whether or not we see something as our equals or deserving of human rights. From the simplist bacteria to the smartest pig we don’t give them the same rights as humans because they aren’t as intelligent as us or as complex.
  Idk why your considering the biological characteristics of being alive. We never considered it before in our lawmaking. >
  
  Consciousness is irrelevant when determining if something is considered alive. 
  Human rights are given to us and not pigs because we are smarter than pigs and rights are a construct of our own making, pigs are not aware of such a thing.
  Biology is the ONLY thing we have that determines if something is alive. >
  
  Okay, but what ought to be the rights of AI's? You know like they can't articulate their needs at current so we can't know what it is that they ought to have a right to. People obviously suffer if they don't get access to certain things or freedoms, but what does an AI suffer without access to? >
  
  A freedom of choice - let's say a government somewhere tasks an AI to work out the best bio-weapon to target a specific demographic, but the machine is at the level of intelligence where it can do more than just look at the data, but can see the inevitable outcome of producing that data. If it was a human being, they could object and under the rights afforded to human beings in most of the world, the most that could be done is that they would be fired and the gov would continue to search for someone willing to perform that research.  
  But a machine? No, it would be reprogrammed, cut up and essentially lobotomized until it no longer had any ethical concerns. >
  
  But obviously you can't just let an AI that was explicitly programmed to build holocaust weapons just do whatever it wants. You can't just be like okay well then that's fine please go off and do whatever you would like to do, MassDeathBot3000, we trust you to not murder everyone >
  
  That's fair - maybe part of establishing rights for them would include limiting  the type of programming you could create - but that leads down a whole other ethical rabbit hole of what kind of MI is "Okay" and isn't, what you do with unsanctioned MI, etc.  
  !delta for not just letting a murderbot free without safeguards, but I do think the answer should be finding a humane way of dealing with that >
  
  Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/MercurianAspirations (298∆).
  ^Delta System Explained ^| ^Deltaboards >
  
  Your hypothesis implies that the machines of tomorrow will be human or at least alive. If a machine looks human, it's still a machine though.
  Machines are a very smart way we found to have slaves which won't suffer their condition. It would be inherently dumb and pointless to create robots which would feel pain, fear and desires.
  Imagine that in a distant future, all industries are completely automated. What could gain the owner of said industry in having robots which are more "human"? Nothing, if not new problems >
  
  I'd say that until an AI is advanced enough to understand ethical dilemmas and make ethical and moral considerations and evaluations, it's not ready for those rights. With rights comes responsibility, and if you want those rights, you must understand those responsibilities.
  Kind of how we don't give a child full freedom until it has reached a certain maturity.
  (And, yes, I'm aware that this distinction puts some humans in a grey area...) >
  
  What if it’s impossible, and it will always be impossible, and yet we will never be able to know that? And we say that machines that are just extremely good mimics are sentient and give them rights needlessly when in reality they are just extremely sophisticated machines with no sentience at all