Empathy for Artificial Intelligences

If it looks like a duck, feels like a duck, and quacks like a duck, why not call it a duck?

Assuming artificial intelligences have ALL the capacities of humans including real sentience, there's no reason they couldn't be in meaningful relationships with people. Would it be weird? Absolutely, but that's only because people ultimately love so they can reproduce and protect each other, and computers really don't need that. It's just something new that we will have to adapt to assuming the tech is developed eventually.

 

Human beings are just biological circuitry. Who is to say our definition of love isn't a biological computer program. If AI does become reality then we will see people fighting for equal rights for AI beings to be defined as sentient.

Suddenly the matrix and that episode of Futurama isn't so far fetched.

 

Just playing mom's advocate, but it sounds like she views the AI as being something more capable and intelligent than he was, like say one of us trying to have a relationship with a lower primate we taught sign language to. That does open up some cans of worms when you look at it that way.

I think there are differences and I don't think that's a good analogy. Maybe there's a point where something just is sentient, and a point where it isn't, and "more advanced" stops mattering. Kind of like filling a pitcher of water 'till it's overfull. And maybe both the human and the AI are past that point, making the relationship OK. Maybe not, but it at least makes it possible to look past that and into other parts of the relationship.

I also don't think (I haven't seen the movie) that the AI was capable of at least intentionally manipulating the main character. From what I understand, she starts out basically a newborn, and relies on him to show her the world. That kind of manipulation, the relationship between HAL and the astronauts in 2001 (it was a movie before my time too don't worry about it), requires a kind of playing the long game, and it's far more likely she fell in love with him long before that.

I think as far as power in the relationship between them, she might surpass him eventually, but he definitely starts out with it, and I don't think her surpassing him is a bad thing. She can help him see the world the way he helped her. It was okay one way; why would it be different the other way.

I could really see things both ways, it being okay, and it being not. And I think, if the AI was sufficiently advanced, she would ask herself all these same questions. Is it okay for us to be in love? What happens when I become smarter than him? What are my goals, and what are his, and what do I want for us?

So I guess, if I had to give an answer one way or the other, it would depend on whether they at least hinted at her asking those kinds of questions on-screen. It's something that comes up with human couples all the time, like "what happens when her business takes off and I quit my job, and I'm depending on her".

 

I'm probably thinking about this since I just finished rewatching a whole bunch of episodes (yay netflix!), but Star Trek Voyager spent a huge amount of time on ideas around the humanity of the Doctor, an artificially intelligent hologram. Many of those episodes were very thought provoking, especially when the Doctor started to have actual character development and started demanding rights for himself.

 

It's weird, but I feel rather strongly about this, especially given that no AIs with emotional capacities yet exist. But I feel when they do, recognising them as having personhood is vital.

 

Just to make things clear - those kind of AI are very far fetched from us as for the moment, and I had an AI lecturer who already said even in 100 years we won't achieve that kind of intelligence, because the AI we have today is the kind that focus on one specific thing for example driving a car, which is not that complicated compared to being able to answer any question logically when a human asks it!

Its very nice philosophical question though, how we should treat high-end-AI.
Would u be able to hit/abuse/kill an AI just because u can?
How far it would be doing it for a human?

 

I am a Luddite/technophobe (that uses technology ), but I really don't know what to say. It reminds me a lot of the movie Bicentennial Man where Robin Williams' character fought for his rights to be considered a person.

In a way, I am old-fashioned with this topic and couldn't really fathom AI being to the level of sentience of human. Apes are more human-like and sentient than computers and technology will be for a long time, and yet I'm OK not giving them their "personhood" status. I really couldn't fathom living in a world where AI would reach the level where such a case would end up going to the Supreme Court.

That said, if/when we reach such a point, humanity will have reached entry into the select club of species, that is not only sentient in and of itself, but intelligent enough to have begot intelligent, sentient life not cut from the same cloth that humanity and Earth's carbon-based lifeforms share.

 

Exactly, there will be a huge debate over existential rights as a sentient being.