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qarl | on: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
Any time I bump into a device that acts like a human I'm going to treat it like a human.

Because treating things that act human inhumanely is not something I want to learn how to do.

Brendinooo | parent | next
My instincts are pretty different here.

- I'll try not to swear at/hit a printer: not because I see the printer as having human-like qualities of being capable but complex and unreliable, but because I want to be a person who can control his temper.

- Treating an inhuman thing as human because it can mimic us in some way is not something that I want to do.

qarl | root | parent
So if a machine does become conscious, you're happy being nasty to it until it is proven conscious?

I try not to make errors like that.

evilduck | root | parent | next
This seems like a variant of Pascal's wager.
hn_acc1 | root | parent | next
Yes. I'm currently not convinced it can ever be so. So until I hear something convincing to the contrary, I believe no machine can be conscious / sentient unless mimicking human behavior. And if it mimics human behavior intentionally, I have to ask why - and the answer is probably to get me to trust / use it more.

I was bright-eyed and excited about tech once. Like back in 1982 when I got my first home computer and thought CPUs were part magic. Now I know how machines work from the transistor level up to neural nets. There's nothing magical about it. And no consciousness.

Having seen the mockery that the finance-bros have made of "pure tech" (i.e. Jobs instead of Woz, Ellison instead of Joy, etc) and all the enshittification just for pure $$$, I'm leery of ANYTHING ANY tech company tells me anymore.

Now, do I believe that possibly "consciousness" is some kind of state of a super-circuit (our brains)? Sure. Can we emulate that on a computer? We can't even emulate a pebble on a computer (not simulate, emulate). We can SIMULATE what we THINK brains are, but we can't emulate a real one. Not even close, not for many decades.

qarl | root | parent
Well, if it's any interest to you, the experts on the matter agree that the issue is unresolved.

So in the meantime, I'm going to err on the side of caution.

You do you.

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micromacrofoot | root | parent | next
just don't treat anything nastily, it's not so difficult - I don't treat my dog like a person but I'm also not nasty to her
qarl | root | parent
Meh. I'm speaking loosely. You know what I mean.

Or you should.

EDIT: It's difficult to have a conversation when one person changes what they said after the fact.

Brendinooo | root | parent | next
What was unclear about my first bullet?
qarl | root | parent
I said "inhumanely". You shifted the goal post to swearing at inanimate objects. I ignored you.
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cmrdporcupine | parent
This is in fact the danger with these human-simulating "AI"s we have now...

People get used to treating human-like, human emulating machines with either disrespect or in a command/control/master fashion, because that's the nature of the tooling.

And then potentially by extent/blurring of lines they then treat other people like machines.

Which is already a thing people do to other people.

I just fear it gets worse.