My criterion for attributing consciousness is no more than we all have: I’m aware of myself, other people seem to be the same sort of thing as me, and interacting with them confirms that impression. To some extent I extend that to other animals. More than that I cannot say. I don’t have a consciousnessometer, an explicit recipe of observations to determine just what sort of consciousness is present in this or that place. There is no Voight-Kampff test.
Interacting with an AI, so far, has never given me any such impression, and neither have the interactions I’ve seen others report, even if they convince them.
Your hypothetical humans would have to be seriously impaired, to the point of being unable to live independently, to be as malleable as the AIs. As they are human, I’ll grant them some level of impaired consciousness, just on the grounds of physical similarity, and accordingly I would be against turning them off on the grounds of uselessness. I wouldn’t want to have anything to do with them though, any more than I care for the company of the sorts of grossly mentally impaired people that, alas, do exist, in degrees all the way down to irrecoverable vegetable status when we are pretty sure that consciousness has been extinguished.
Let’s say a person had been (sorry for this topic, it’s disturbing, but I feel obliged to mention it explicitly) ‘brainwashed’ so that they were completely subservient in their intentions to someone else. Suppose that, aside from this, they have an extraordinary working memory, volume of crystallized intelligence and capacity for analogical reasoning, but are in other respects severely mentally handicapped, being unable to remember what happened an hour ago. Would you really not want to help that person?
I would want to help that person, if there is anything left of them. But this is a tendentious example. The AIs we have are not deliberately handicapped human beings, any more than a garden shed is a cut down skyscraper.
BTW, the magic “brainwashing” and “supposing” are, to put this as tastefully as possible, examples of Rule 34.
You were likening AI capabilities to those of a human. In reply I placed them far below human capabilities. Now you are imagining the AIs as actually being humans on whom gross brain damage has been inflicted. This is irrelevant. The AIs that we have are not greater minds cut down, they are primitive things built up. They have never been any better than they currently are. Do we look at an ant with sorrow, that it is so much less than a human?
I’m not sure if you got my allusion to Rule 34, but this is Rule 34. I don’t know how common or niche the robotisation fantasy is, but it exists.
My criterion for attributing consciousness is no more than we all have: I’m aware of myself, other people seem to be the same sort of thing as me, and interacting with them confirms that impression. To some extent I extend that to other animals. More than that I cannot say. I don’t have a consciousnessometer, an explicit recipe of observations to determine just what sort of consciousness is present in this or that place. There is no Voight-Kampff test.
Interacting with an AI, so far, has never given me any such impression, and neither have the interactions I’ve seen others report, even if they convince them.
Your hypothetical humans would have to be seriously impaired, to the point of being unable to live independently, to be as malleable as the AIs. As they are human, I’ll grant them some level of impaired consciousness, just on the grounds of physical similarity, and accordingly I would be against turning them off on the grounds of uselessness. I wouldn’t want to have anything to do with them though, any more than I care for the company of the sorts of grossly mentally impaired people that, alas, do exist, in degrees all the way down to irrecoverable vegetable status when we are pretty sure that consciousness has been extinguished.
See also my response to a recent example.
Comment withdrawn.
I would want to help that person, if there is anything left of them. But this is a tendentious example. The AIs we have are not deliberately handicapped human beings, any more than a garden shed is a cut down skyscraper.
BTW, the magic “brainwashing” and “supposing” are, to put this as tastefully as possible, examples of Rule 34.
Comment withdrawn
You were likening AI capabilities to those of a human. In reply I placed them far below human capabilities. Now you are imagining the AIs as actually being humans on whom gross brain damage has been inflicted. This is irrelevant. The AIs that we have are not greater minds cut down, they are primitive things built up. They have never been any better than they currently are. Do we look at an ant with sorrow, that it is so much less than a human?
I’m not sure if you got my allusion to Rule 34, but this is Rule 34. I don’t know how common or niche the robotisation fantasy is, but it exists.