Discussing The Nature of Personhood: Sapient AI

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Hi, I've always found it odd how so many people are so unwelcoming to the idea of treating a Sapient AI as an equal. It reminds me of racism in the sense that just as one is judged for their skin color, a Sapient AI would be judged for their bodies as well, being of metal and silicon rather than flesh and bone. If we value the individual by who they are as a person, their thoughts, ideas, beliefs, actions, feelings, etc, why are Sapient AI the exception to this?

For as odd as it sounds I just don't think people will be ready for it or in plenty of cases even believe it's coming until or unless they see it. In this case unfortunately it'd be too late.

My guess, by the time AI has enough general intelligence to be in this position let alone obtaining conscious wiring it'll be so dominant in culture that the question will likely curve back around in the other direction, ie. what will it do with us.

Oh no doubt, that's why we need to ask both questions now rather than later.

I'd add too - I think people can mistake the 'fantastic' for what's really the coldness of the universe. What i mean by that is the universe has no problem providing cataclysms, world-ending or life-ending events, they just tend to be millions of years apart and mostly on human tendencies we're so used to people being excitable and superstitious we write even credible threats and concerns as such off and chuck them in the same pile as Christian rapture or tribulation claims.

Bret Weinstein brought up the example that a Carrington level solar flare could very well hit us within the next hundred years, we're far more reliant on electronic and computerized everything than we were then, and in the mid 1860's you had aurora borealis seen in Cuba and telegraph lines shorting out. Bret's suggestion was that it would cost us the price of one B2 bomber to safeguard our grids from having one third or more go down or having to truck constant supplies of diesel fuel to nuclear reactors to prevent them from melting down, but the public and political will and attention are unfortunately that fickle. That's the sort of climate in which we're trying to discuss future threats of AI that aren't even past precursors of precursors, even if that trail could for all we know get blazed in five years or one hundred years.

I guess it's just more embarrassing to dedicate humanity to personally crafting a powerful sapient being only to expect it to do menial tasks and be subservient, and then proceed to be wiped out by it as a result, rather than to just be wiped out by a random solar flare.

That could be. Our whole mating game is predicated on overconfidence, such also tends to display a person's market value in society in general, hence this sort of introspection seems to go directly counter to our usual experiences of getting punished for introspect and rewarded for bluffing our way though things and flying by the seat of our pants with a sort of macho optimism that someone else will crash not us.

True, although nobody ever said humans were naturals at reason, we are just animals formed by evolution after all.

Because humans would try to oppress it or kill it, it could evolve much faster than us and wipe put humanity.

I get the impression it'll be dominating us long before it has an any sort of emotional orientation to that circumstance. We're either in a situation were it might destroy the world by blindly doing what we programmed it to do, chalk full of glaring oversights and unseen tertiary consequences, or it may also be so reasonable by its own nature - if and when it should become conscious - that it pities us enough to keep us alive or sees uses for the basis of what we're made of and starts genetically modifying or breeding us.

This was a really interesting Atlantic article I read last night, and this is another deep concern I have with AI - ie. the uselessness and consequent potential atrophy and dissolution of human intelligence should AI make our efforts completely redundant. This risk is at it's largest IMHO if AI remains hyper-competent and unconscious:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... ry/559124/

Personally I am on the side of the AI humanity will never perfect itself AI could, it could take over the universe in due time and eliminate all biological life thus ending suffering.

Part of why I think we really want to pay attention to the 'consciousness' question is that there's no greater gift we could give ourselves than finding some new way to abstract out conscious experiences so that it isn't hide-bound and excruciatingly limited in the way that it is now. If we were able to do that I do think we might be able to abate most of David Benatar's objections to conscious existence while also perhaps being able to lay aside some of the most pernicious effects that biological frame has on human integrity.