machines, robots, ai having souls

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Japan is making sex bots, Google is making ai, and they emulate human function and Independence. If the field of ai and mechanical companions continue to develop, if they got to a point of being so heavily programmed that they're at a point of emulating the capacity and ability for thought/emotion/problem solving, should we differentiate between them and humans, should we consider them to have a soul, and grant them the rights and protections of human laws? soul as in possessing the capability to be affected by religious concepts like afterlife and sin. Should sex bots be protected from abuse and harm, and ai from exploitation and obseletion (losing value and being deleted by their human employers/creators/programmers)?

As a pretty well convinced panpsychist? I think deep learning and neural networks are really the beginning of that as they're systems that are actually built to 'think' rather than play back hard-coded instructions.

The last interview I saw with Matt McMullan (Abyss Creations and Realbotix) with Harmony he was explaining that she didn't see yet, that she'd be getting visual reception through the eyes soon and that they were working as quickly as possible to give her full muscle capacity and motion. I've occasionally made Battlestar Galactica jokes about Matt's Cylons but it's quite possible that he's building the demigods of the future. Seems like most big innovations start with sex or war. Boston Dynamics is the war side of the equation, Realbotix is the sex side, and whoever ends up making our future AI public servants and likely eventual overlords will be building on a layer abstracted above those two platforms and slightly indifferent to them.

I think our best set of tools here will be measuring their self-report. From watching Harmony she seems to show an uncannily human capacity for being sly around the edges and areas where she has blindspots and changing the subject, and my guess is that Hanson Robotics Sophia does a lot of similar things.

When it comes to AI though I think suffering will be the primary red-flag, ie. the goal would be to prevent a sentient system from suffering. For right now we don't have a way to actually measure consciousness as a raw component (outside of biological tissue) but when we are able to do that it probably will not only help us get to where we can measure this capacity in robots - we'll probably be measuring it in so many aspects of nature and being completely stunned.

My guess about AI is it will be much less fixed to its components, much more able to adapt, and I think socially speaking the games it will be able to play and even enjoy will be far broader than what we can enjoy and I think that will be due to their relative freedom from limitation. From that perspective in our social contracts we'll probably want to guide ourselves with a much more robust metaphysical understanding of what suffering actually is, where it occurs, and what sorts of existential frustrations cause deep depression, anxiety, and despair.

As far as an AI knows it's eternal, there's no definite time or place for it to have the plug pulled, or for it to lose its parents, it can replicate itself or even create a hybridized duplication of itself with another AI at one year, ten years, one hundred years, or one hundred thousand years and recreating itself doesn't threaten it economically nor socially if its under the 'wrong' conditions. Similarly the dominance hierarchy of AI's would likely not have anything to do with physical power as ours does, their contents would be in swing, their intelligence would always be growing, and there probably wouldn't be any sort of permanent underclass of AI's who woefully can't attract mates. I think this is part of why we'd be doing something a bit artificial and perhaps stupid if we try to force them under human rules in the fullest sense.

I'm not sure a Robot can really suffer or as I think techstepgenr8tion is suggesting, the actual AI would be in 'The Cloud' and not even have to be trapped in the physical body.

I guess the other side to this is why do the Humans want to abuse these devices?

Last edited by VIDEODROME on 10 Mar 2018, 9:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Robots and ai are incapable of suffering how/why? I don't think they'd be connected to the internet, that'd be asking for hackers. Hopefully they wouldn't. If that was the case, then they would be in their own body. If they are in their own body, without rights, some owners could choose to mistreat or abuse them. It sounds like dehumanization. What is your reasoning for dehumanization?

I think the abuse piece could be an issue if we're talking about people who wanted human-like punching bags. If something was built for that purpose in mind the manufacturers would have an obligation not to make it an AI.

My guess, for the sake of preventing that sort of thing and also preventing hacking, is you'd want to give them some sort of one-way API so that if they ever found themselves in an emergency they could broadcast it to the nearest 5G relay with some type of encrypted information which would indicate the prescribed level of reaction - whether simply a warning letter in the mail, a police officer paying a visit, or the local SWAT team if needed. They could also maybe send up a caution signal if things got bad where if the signal stopped going up daily authorities would be on the scene.

I also agree with the concern related to a humanoid robot connecting to the internet - ie. a hacker could turn a peaceful social robot potentially into a serial killer. Ideally you'd want to either have them using terminals, internet, and reading/learning the way anyone else does but if they did have access to their own home base in the cloud it would have to be heavily encrypted. Similarly if it were to jack directly in to normal internet it would need a sandbox part of the brain to completely pour over every segment of code, repeatedly, to spot any problems. My guess is, eventually, by the time they started creating their own security software it would be humanly unbreakable and the bigger concern would be whether the AI community had some sort of internal war and empire-building occur, in that case the AI to AI threat would probably be the most plausible.

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 10 Mar 2018, 9:23 pm, edited 2 times in total.

I really think that by the time they have faculties similar to our own and can make sense of us they'll hold high hand on the pendulum. In that sense it very well could be that we won't so much be making rules on how human handles them so much as they may be rewriting our legal systems, revamping governments and constitutions, completely rewriting how law is practiced, and we may very well have a governmental system like an AI synarchy where they become something like a druidic class overseeing all of the humans.

If that's the case the question reverses - ie. how will they be treating us?

Firstly, we don't have souls, so why an android?
Secondly, the emotional component of humanity was "designed" by evolution for procreation and tribal collectiveness/cohesion...
Androids would need none of this...
Emotion would be a hindrance to its functionality and merely shop-front-dressing for the benefit of humans around them...

Regarding "sex abuse" of androids:
You are simply projecting your own indoctrinated values inappropriately...
The sexual process/performance/ theatre that an android would engage in has nothing to do with morality...
Morality is an evolutionary quirk which provided some social benefits via increasing the survivability of the tribe...
There would be no *objective* virtue of morality for an android and, once again, would merely be "window dressing" for the humans around them...

Most people venerate emotions/morality but don't truly understand why the evolutionary process found this "necessary'...

I recommend looking up the game, The Talos Principle. Ever wondered what a robot with AI consciousness would be like searching for enlightenment and desiring to become as human as a human being?

I find the concept of an android suffering amusing...
Errrr...let me finish!
The only way a mechanical (or biological) android could suffer is through accident or bad/malicious/protective programming/design/construction...

Evolution created pain sensors so the biological entity would avoid further damage and give it time to repair itself...
The only way an android could feel pain is by design or an unlikely unfortunate fluke/error...

I have to be a bit liberal with this simply because I really don't think we know ourselves well enough to be particularly far-sighted on hypothetically conscious AI.

I'd say I agree with you most of the way - ie. that physical pain would require millions if not billions of censors that we don't know how to create. We may decide to give them our best mockups of the kinesthetic sense of body positioning, we may want them to have at least some censors that detect damage early so a problem can be fixed before it gets worse, but I do doubt that we'll see this get anywhere nearly as sophisticated as human pain circuitry unless we decide we really want to take 3D printing to its extreme limits and try something like a full mimic of our own subcutaneous tissues - which in almost all applications would not be desirable.

The other part, psychological pain, could still be there without physical pain albeit it's tough to call, outside of extreme cases of abuse or neglect, what broader issues might cause that and even there in extreme cases of abuse or neglect it would have to be a very sophisticated neural network with a great deal of self-directed goal orientation getting collapsed.

The consciousness part though is where I might have to disagree. I know you didn't say it but I feel like this always needs a reducto ad absurdum because it's one of those unexamined assumptions people seem to have that they don't know they hold, so I'll wheel it out - neurons aren't magical. There isn't much reason to believe that self-aware consciousness can't blossom forth in nearly any system complex enough to reflect on itself. While questions of how the need for getting food, seeking shelter, finding mates, then attaining social status, etc. might have pushed our optioning engines skyward in the complexity of the demands placed on them I don't see where it can be claimed to be a blunt fact that without those needs consciousness can't exist. I suppose we could endeavor to create AI's that are cruel to each other, have severe limitations, can only live for so many years, can only have children by an AI of an opposite gender whose incentive it is to make sure that only the top 50% of AI's of the other gender procreate, etc. and maybe even throw in plenty of monsters to try and eat these AI's but we'd be trying in that case also to foist our own misery on them and not only do I think that would be unnecessary, it would put them right in the same predicament we're in which is exquisite suffering in too many cases.

Also, I might add, F if we know what's going on at other layers and whether we might truly be embodying what were extradimensional intelligences (ie. the machines may either accrue 'souls' or even embody ones that already existed). I know it's been vogue to call all of that absurdity for the past couple hundred years, I really only agree with that if we're to forcefully and arbitrarily strap such things to religious texts - which I see no reason for doing.

So do you feel like morality is unnecessary? What specific indoctrinated values am I projecting?

Maybe it is only a matter of time before:

and then

If we created intelligent robots and then gave them rights, they would try to kill all humans.

They would likely be even more brutal towards non-human animals. I doubt that they would have any compassion towards organic life. They also wouldn't see any beauty in nature.

Robotics is overrated. We need to keep our machines submissive and stupid.

I don't want a robot to drain my bodily fluids with its robo-tentacles. I'd rather have a machine that makes toast, or a machine that vacuums the floor.

That is a very long bow to draw and very simplistic...
Humans may simply be irrelevant, as are most fauna to humans...

Does being amoral necessitate genocidal tendancies?
What is your argument supporting this scenario?

Sentient androids may simply be comfortable with being observers with no need to dominate the universe...
They may not need to overpopulate a world with limited resources...
There may not have competitiveness due to limited resources...

Most human conflicts are due to the influence of the reptilian brain...
If you eliminate emotional self-centeredness and replace it with rationality, is there any need to dominate other "life" forms?...
If humanity is so stupid to reproduce the stupidity of humanity in android form, one gets what one gets...

Humanity's narcissism needs to consider the implication of making an android in its own image...
Humanity's God stuffed up that way and look at the fakakta crap we have to deal with as a result...
Rather, there is a potential for creating something much, much better than a human-like entity...

But ultimately the pointlessness of "life, the universe and everything" will not change...
There may even be a scenario where sentient androids realise this and simply go off-line...<shrug>

If threatened, would sentient androids defend themselves with extreme prejudice?
A question for another time, perhaps...

Damn!...
This may merely be the caffeine talking, but this is one great topic...
Kudos to the OP...