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100 sats \ 12 replies \ @SimpleStacker 10h \ on: Can Machines Think? It Doesn't Matter AI
Exactly.
But I do think there's a related question that isn't quite covered by the submarine example, which is: Should a human-like machine be afforded human rights?
lol... give me a break
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I suppose you think they don't deserve any rights?
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I suppose I think a machine is a machine. So no. I don't think my computer has rights.
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See, you're gonna have to argue for your position within a materialist (in the philosophical sense) culture that cannot even articulate what makes a human more than a biological machine.
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I'm not. Because I'm not a materialist. That view is flawed. We should start with dolphins and chimps if that was the case.
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I agree, but my statements are purely descriptive, not prescriptive. This is going to become a cultural debate, because most people in our culture are functionally materialists.
Their materialism is going to cause them great confusion on this subject, as it already has on other subjects.
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Here's the deal though. Most materialists do not believe in negative rights. They do not believe that rights come from a creator or nature. They think they come from the state or some document. We see it here on SN even. So in that paradigm I can have the right to whatever and I can just identify as whatever. So in my opinion this debate about AI is pointless. It needs to go to the base assumptions under it. Rights and materialists assumptions. Adding AI to it is just noise and frankly it bothers me that many that do understand natural rights and negative vs. positive rights are getting sucked into humanizing these algos. Its a back door to many philosophical problems.
Thanks for bringing this up.
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I agree -- and I think you are thinking clearly. I am just not confident that the rest of society will (or even can) think clearly, because their baseline assumptions are just incoherent. If rights stems from politics then they're not even rights.
I agree it's noise, but so much of society is wrapped up around debating noise because they don't think straight, and actually can't think straight because of incoherent worldview.
You aren't wrong. Its one of the root problems in modern society that no one talks about.
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I suppose if I were to apply natural rights to AI one would say that the creator grants them rights if anyone would do it. The problems with this whole thing are multitude. IP law would be a problem since it would imply that the AI code is owned by a corporation. So then we get into slavery... I mean I have thought for a while that AI might be the thing that breaks our IP law nonsense finally. Not that it isn't already shot full of logical holes on how it is and isn't applied.
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Let me just put it this way. Thinking a computer/machine is self aware is about as true and thinking a printer is self aware because it prints words. It can't write or think. Its a machine.
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