You and Androids

[shapeshifter]

Androids should not have/need rights until they day they ask for them. ;-)

 

[RobertScorpio]

Androids should not have/need rights until they day they ask for them. ;-)

Lot of help that did for Africans for hundreds and hundres of years...

Rob

 

[shapeshifter]

True, very true.

But people today are nowhere near as barbaric as they used t-..., er..., uh..., um... So, how's the weather in San Diego?

 

[RobertScorpio]

True, very true.

But people today are nowhere near as barbaric as they used t-..., er..., uh..., um... So, how's the weather in San Diego?

Actually, it is 82 degrees right now here where I live in San Diego. I'm actually running my air conditioner and watching Kentucky covered in ice....if only we could find a way to bottle our heat and send it back there, and if only they could find a way to bottle all that flooding which will come in the spring to us....


Rob

 

[Ptrope]

Androids as a labor force make little sense, since if you're going to build a robot to do work, there's no particular reason to make it look like a human. Androids, robots designed to emulate the appearance of humans, would exist for a limited range of purposes, mainly for jobs involving interaction with humans -- with sexual interactions probably topping the list. Androids would be a small subset of robots in general.

As for the whole slavery thing, that doesn't really make sense. If you're going to create a machine to be an obedient servant, why would you build it with the ability to think for itself? That's counterproductive. Especially when that would be a very complex and probably very expensive thing to achieve. Again, RobertScorpio, you need to keep in mind that real life isn't like fiction. Stories about sapient robots held in slavery are meant as allegories for injustices among humans, not as realistic predictions.

A more worthwhile question is what androids would do to human psychology and relationships. If we could have simulated romantic partners programmed to conform to our fantasies and desires, would we be willing to settle for the imperfections and difficulties of relationships with real people?

Spot on, all points. One other thing to keep in mind is that AI doesn't automatically mean "sapient" - we have sapient life here that's barely intelligent, after all (are you smarter than a 5th grader?) . And aside from "sex toys," I could see certain uses for androids in other areas where they need to either interact with humans and such a presentation would be psychologically beneficial, or in industrial situations where they either replace or augment a human workforce and it would be better to make them humanoid in order to reduce the need for customized equipment or environments specifically for the androids. After all, there are many cases where bipedal locomotion is more effective than rollers, wheels or treads, and the same could be said of much of the human form. As machines go, the human body is a pretty effective design, after all.

How would sex workers respond to android prostitutes "taking work away from them?" What would be the moral issues around personal 'partners' that don't conform to societal 'norms,' but because they aren't living beings and are specifically programmed, can't be considered 'unable to consent?" I think you're right: like home video players and the Internet, sex will probably be the major component behind the advance of humanoid robotics technology.

 

[Lapis Exilis]

Should AI "wake up" on its own - and it is exceedingly likely that it will one day* - it could easily not resemble human intelligence. Which begs the question, would we recognize it as something deserving of rights?

There are other questions as well - is intelligence the measure we use to determine who gets rights? It is not, for we afford rights to human beings with extremely low intelligences. So, what is the criteria for a creature deserving of rights and how do we determine a creature possesses that quality?

"Sentience" is used around here in the common sci-fi way to mean something beyond intelligence - consciousness, but "sentience" actually means "having sensation". My pet cat is sentient, but does he have consciousness? This is one of the most slippery concepts in the human lexicon. Our computers can already out-think us, but they aren't capable of independent action (theoretically - mine certainly does what it damn well pleases from time to time).

So, what is consciousness and how might an artificial intelligence possess it?






*Experiments on things like "artificial life", web technology, neural nets and so forth continue unabated. All of these involve striving for AI with responses unlike current computers - that is AI that is able to innovate, think creatively, and learn. This is done by researchers both for its practical applications, and because they simply want to see if the ineffable quality of human thought can be reproduced. Whether that is some sort of rational ambition, or yet another symptom of the narcissicism of the human race, if folks keep messing about with webs and nets and so forth, eventually one of them will hit a self-organizing cycle and become a complex adaptive system capable of an evolution - at least that's what the emerging field of Complexity Theory seems to make plain. Not all CAS's necessarily evolve to intelligence, but since these systems were invented with that specific goal, they are quite a fer piece down the line to doing so. I think it's pretty likely that someone will one day set in motion a system that will evolve a true AI.

 

[shapeshifter]

Androids should not have/need rights until they day they ask for them. ;-)

Lot of help that did for Africans for hundreds and hundres of years...

Rob

True, very true.

But people today are nowhere near as barbaric as they used t-..., er..., uh..., um... So, how's the weather in San Diego?

Actually, it is 82 degrees right now here where I live in San Diego. I'm actually running my air conditioner and watching Kentucky covered in ice....if only we could find a way to bottle our heat and send it back there, and if only they could find a way to bottle all that flooding which will come in the spring to us....


Rob

I knew that, I just needed to change the subject because your logic had my back to the corner. I see what you mean, I vote option two.