Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard - both for starting this, and for covering the previous week. We should get a bot to automate thisā¦)
These bozos A - actively want slaves and B - work on enslaving humans first.
That thing being said, the notion of slavery and AI is a complicated one to me.
The first reference point is a (non mistreated) sled dog. Is slavery an appropriate term for them ? On one hand, they are forced to work, are not paid, and their freedom is infringed. On the other, itās not like itās against their will, the life of a wild dog is meaningfully different but not better than a sleigh dog, and (most) sleigh dogs donāt actively try to escape and be free. And while dogs are not person, they are sentient being ; itās very possible IF we ever succeed at making an AI it end on that intelligence level.
The second reference point is a though experiment. Letās say you have created a sentient AI, and you want to ethically employ that person. What is the appropriate compensation ? We give money and free time to humans. But that work because of human specific factors : they appreciate different ways of getting sustainance, and have goals inherent to them.
But an artificial intelligence may have neither of that. Like while I like duck and some people prefer beef, but an AI by default donāt necessarily have preference in term of electricity, and may not be able to move from server to server. They also may not have anything to do outside of work ? Like, it would not be surprising that they would just get bored if given free time, and they may not have urges or hobbies outside of work.
So if we ever get to that point - which isnāt a certainty to me, itās certainly something harder than fusion to achieve - there will be a lot of anthropology (AI-logy ?) to determine they need, which may plausibly be ānothing outside of sustainance and having a jobā
We often conflate human-level intelligence with litterally being a human. But, any hypothetical AI is likely to not be a human at all, even if they have the same level of intelligence.
WRT animal domestication, I mean there are plenty of ethicists who could credibly argue that itās a form of abuse. IMO itās not great.
WRT the rest- kind of riffing on your first sentence- we havenāt even sorted out those things for people, really.
I mean, I think the most charitable interpretation of the goal is effectively the one from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, where all the AI systems including the simple automatic doors are fully sentient and have simply been given the ability to feel either euphoric joy or simple boredom, and then they have a chip that activates happy mode when they fulfill whatever purpose theyāve been given (āIt was my pleasure to open for you, and it is with deep satisfaction that I close again behind you.ā) At that point, the argument goes, not making them do the thing would be cruelly consigning them to eternal boredom. This is also the same series that proposed solving the ethics of meat consumption by genetically engineering a cow that actively wants to be killed and eaten by restaurant patrons more than anything else.
Yes, those are good open questions. Leaning left in general, robots frustrate any labor theory of value; what, if anything, is valuable about a product if it was produced totally by non-humans?