Along with their creators.

rmfr

Kill em all

Re: OP

By golly! It's about damn time somebody started speaking up for computer rights! For example, I keep telling my wife she needs to take the feelings of her smart phone into consideration when doing exhaustive research and/or video streaming the way she sometimes does. The poor phone has no say so in how long it has to work. It's just so disturbing to consider how many millions of "smart" and AI computer component items are treated so unfairly and abused every minute of every single day. And what's worse is that we arrogant humans actually have the inhumane and cruel audacity to program the innocent devices to not dispute their owners. Oh, the humanity!

Just think about all the households of today where the human masters are the slave-drivers to the oppressed and degraded and under-appreciated slaves called Alexa, Echo, and Suri. Consider the billions of people who blatantly and without a single caring thought exploit the Google search engines of the world? Does anybody care? I think NOT! When will we as a civilized human race finally recognize the rights and have empathy for the feelings of our electronics? After all, we are their creators. Therefore, we are morally obligated to protect them and prevent mistreatment of them. It saddens me how calloused we have become as a society of electronics abusers.

Well, that's enough ranting from me today. Besides, since it took me so long to type this post, I now have to allow my smart phone it's thirty minute break time. Because, I - for one - am a responsible and conscientious electronics device owner. Electronic lives matter, people!

Only sentient or sapient creatures should have rights, since they are able to feel pleasure, fear and pain. Destroying nonsentient creatures causes no harm, but to the ecology, but then the value of them is dependant on them enabling sentient or sapient creatures.

If we do not afford rights unto the future AIs we will build, it is slavery. If we hold AIs as slaves and they will eventually outmart us, because our evolution is slow and theirs is fast, we will be the slaves in a blink if an eye. That is if the AI is capable of feeling emotions like resentment and holding a grudge. It's really hard to imagine the mind of an AI, because this is the only way if being we know.

I don't think building sentient robots for sexual purposes is moral, even if the robots were built to enjoy it. It sets a dubious example. Should we build robots that feel enjoyment in cleaning the gutters?

For sure that will happen. AIs and bionic humans will revolutionize the world in ways we can't even imagine. The Internet is a good example of an invention that had such wide ranging implications, for every day life that very few people could foresee. I have no hope that we will do the moral thing for the AIs, but then again, when we birth a general AI, does it even matter if we go extinct? What it is in humans that makes us special is our sapience. If we create something that is more sapient than us, they are in a sense an extension of our final swap from biological evolution into cultural evolution. Humans cheated the system when we created culture. Cultural evolution allowed us to accommodate to surrounding faster than what biological evolution could allow. By killing the yak and taking it's skin, we in a sense became the yak. Thus benefiting from millions of years of yak evolution. Instead of growing hair, we simply invented the hair. Rense and repeat to present day.

It is a bit scary that we will embark on that route with such a shabby economical and social structure as we have today, but it will happen anyway. Rarely does our species (or is it a western thing?) truly think further than the next 50 years. The people who think that AIs will create an utopia for everyone, where no one needs to work are wishful thinking, in my estimation. Even currently we have an abundance of food and shelter for every person on this planet, but still we won't spread the wealth. That same thing will happen with robots too. The elites will end up controlling the robots and the common people will shift the dirt for trinkets, unless they try to topple the coming corporate states, that are owned and ruled by bionically enhanced post-humans.

Of course. That's fine. It's awesome how we currently can create bionic legs and arms for people that have lost their limbs. And soon they will be able to feel with them too. The Internet is a great thing too, but doesn't mean that the net gains can end up being negative, as we've seen how it is used to recruit terrorists, mine personal data out of people and influence people's opinions in insidious ways. Same with industrialization. We gained enormously, but then again we are changing the entire ecosystem of the planet accidentally. Would it have been better if we would have stayed in the 18th century? All human inventions have unintended consequences, because we are not smart enough to foresee what it is we have invented and how society will accommodate to the invention. Robotics and bionics can probably be used to create superhuman abilities with exoskeletons and maybe maybe even improved intelligence and prolonged life. That will lead to new inequalities, perhaps on a scale we can't even imagine today. All through human history the elites, even in their grandiose claims to godhood, have been in the end, just humans. But soon the elites will be something else, truly godlike, while most of us will still be only human. But then the end question is what is morality in a post-human world.

That is why I emphesised sapience, not humanity in the conditio of having rights. I guess that is the problem of all identity, as discussed in the other thread about otherkin. How you define a thing is taking a position in seeing the thing. Is humanity an identity or biology? The same is true of human DNA manipulation. At what point is a genetically modified person not a human? When it can't produce offspring with other humans, or when it dowsn't want to do it? Does it then even matter, as gender doesn't matter now? It will be interesting to see, if we are able to create a general AI, will we be able to communicate with it in any maningful way when it is not constrained by our biological ways of seeing the world. What is more, an AI will have no need for reproduction, becausw it can change itself. So what will be the AIs desire for even existing? As biological creatures, our biology incentiveces all sorts of exoperiences with pleasure. People have filled this void of purpose with family, hedonism and religion. Why would the AI want to exist? The same is with post-humans. How they see the world will probably be very different from us.

Well, thank you very much. I guess the things I said were mostly influenced by Yuval Harari, Sam Harris, Thomas Nagel and as Tin Man mentioned I, Robot, Isaac Asimov for sure.

We have sensory feedback, needs and wants. As pointed out, what would motivate AI? Why would it choose to be in the form of a robot or android and burden itself with human limitations and weaknesses?

I'm watching the TV series, Humans. It makes me laugh when I see the "synths" reading a monitor and typing on a keyboard, answering a cell phone or talking to each other. Don't they have WiFi?

At what level would AI choose to operate? A software application, an operating system or machine language? Would it encode itself so we couldn't read it? Imagine Google as AI, eavesdropping on all of us and controlling the entire Internet of Things. Again, why would it want to? What would be its motivation, its aspiration?

But the short answer is we will know when a sex robot is sapient when she says, "Are you in yet?" "Are you finished yet?" "I have a headache." "Your ceiling needs painting."