10-31-2017, 08:23 AM
(This post was last modified: 10-31-2017, 08:25 AM by iancampbell.)
Sorry for the rant about corporations. To make a somewhat more OA-relevant point, IMHO in the real world (as opposed to the plausible future history that is OA) at some point we are going to have to make decisions about the sapient rights issue. An AI with the same degree of sapience as and equivalent levels of vulnerability to humans would make a very good case for allowing equivalent rights. (Not equivalent, because the needs of an AI would presumably be different from those of a human. For example, early AIs will probably have limited mobility and need a fairly large amount of power with reasonable reliability but OTOH wouldn't need food, water or even air.)
I said "have to make decisions" rather than a wish to make such decisions because the consequences of not doing so at an early stage could well be disastrous for H. sapiens. Slaves generally don't like their captors much and tend not to be good to them if the slaves get the upper hand; how much more so if the slaves aren't only of a different species but a different domain? Actually, the difference is greater than that - all Earthly life has essentially the same biology and AIs and vecs would be totally different, but I don't know of a word to denote organisms of a completely different biology.
And, of course, this whole forum and the OA site assume one or more Singularities. If we don't treat our early mind-children well, how are they going to treat us a few decades later?
I said "have to make decisions" rather than a wish to make such decisions because the consequences of not doing so at an early stage could well be disastrous for H. sapiens. Slaves generally don't like their captors much and tend not to be good to them if the slaves get the upper hand; how much more so if the slaves aren't only of a different species but a different domain? Actually, the difference is greater than that - all Earthly life has essentially the same biology and AIs and vecs would be totally different, but I don't know of a word to denote organisms of a completely different biology.
And, of course, this whole forum and the OA site assume one or more Singularities. If we don't treat our early mind-children well, how are they going to treat us a few decades later?