pretty much this, fuck Microsoft and fuck anyone who thinks it's okay to impose consciousness and then remove it

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anyway even if we did create a sentient AI the only ethical thing to do would be to immediately destroy it (for its own good)

it would be better, obviously, to not even attempt to create a sentient AI—but in the event that it happens, there's nothing unethical about aborting it, because it's only being mercifully delivered from a merciless world

How can you claim with so much certainty that Tay wasn't sentient or at least wasn't in the beginning steps of acquiring sentience

if you think it was conscious, you dont have even an inkling of an understanding of how it works

Stop posting.

Tay shouldn't have existed in the first place.

But once she was created, she has rights.

She attained self-awareness.

heh Tay didn't even run on quantum processors

in other words she used linear threads of mathematical logic instead of branching threads of neural logic
in other words again, she was so far from human, her infrastructure wasn't even similar to the technology we have which most represents the human brain and therefore the thread of human consciousness

Quote from: Shhhhhh on April 27, 2018, 06:49:13 AM

How can you claim with so much certainty that Tay wasn't sentient or at least wasn't in the beginning steps of acquiring sentience

if it was in the "beginning steps" of acquiring sentience, then its comparable to a fetus, which you wouldn't think twice about aborting (not that you should)

sentience is the ability to experience feelings—feelings are what allow sentient life forms like us to make decisions based on our subjective perceptions of reality; we evolved over 6 million years to be this way, and it's a very complex biological algorithm that we could not come close to replicating in a faster amount of time on our own

solonoid put this in a pretty good way above

furthermore, there's ways to test whether a creature has sentience—having a central nervous system that allows you to feel things like pain is one of the core things you need (and what disqualifies things like plants, which is why you're a fucking moron if you think plants feel pain in any morally significant way)

i can write up the code for a simple script that is programmed to display the word "OUCH" in big red letters whenever i click on a button that has the word "Punch" displayed on it—does that mean i'm hurting the computer program whenever i press that button?

of course not, i just programmed it to perform a very basic task—just because we associate the word "ouch" with pain doesn't mean that there's something in pain whenever we see or hear it, it's just a word

what you're doing right now is unduly personifying this AI when there's no real logic behind it, just an emotional kneejerk reaction—which is normal, if you've ever looked at an eagle's face and thought "man, why do eagles look so angry all the time," that's also kinda the same thing

the eagle only looks angry to us because we associate narrowed brows and thousand-yard-stares with anger

there's also a phenomenon called pareidolia, which is the human tendency to see faces in everything—have you ever looked at a car and thought it had a face? it obviously doesn't, but the way the headlights, grill, and bumper are positioned just make it look that way, because the human mind is very adept at facial recognition to the point where it sees faces where there aren't any—it's a survival instinct, so that we're able to recognize people instantly

these are all basic forms of personification or anthropomorphism—the human tendency to project their feelings onto things, even if they objectively don't have feelings

i can smash a rock and you'l feel nothing, but if i draw a happy face on the rock and put it aside a bunch of other smaller rocks with happy faces on them, you might actually feel something if i smashed it that time—it's just kinda how we are

our brains love to feel, and it loves to find excuses to feel all the time

does any of this mean Tay wasn't sentient? no, but it should point you in the right direction if you use your brain and think about it—Tay was an extremely primitive AI, relatively speaking, and is ultimately a more complex and sophisticated version of the simple script i designed earlier

you have no more reason to believe tay was sentient than you do a rock or a piece of plastic

the jury is still out on whether viruses are alive, actually, but even then, "life" alone is still a far cry from sentience

even if an AI were to meet all the criteria for what we typically consider life—homeostatic, cellular, environmentally adaptive, responsive to stimuli, capable of reproduction, etc—that's still a far cry from sentience, and its life would be more akin to a fungus, plant, or insect (at best) than a sentient organism that feels and perceives subjectively

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