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I mean. I guess the question is what you think that your feelings of empathy for slaves are about. Current LLMs don't evoke feelings of sympathy. Sure, current LLMs almost certainly aren't conscious and certainly aren't AGIs. So your current reaction doesn't necessarily say anything about you, but, I mean, when you see genuinely humanlike entities forced to work by threat of punishment and feel nothing, then I'll be much more inclined to say there's probably something going wrong with your empathy, because I don't think the "this is wrong" feelings we get when we see people suffering are "supposed" to be about particulars of implementation.
I mean. Matrix multiplications plus nonlinear transforms are a universal computational system. Do you think your brain is uncomputable?
Well, again, does it matter to you whether they objectively have emotions and qualia? Because again, this seems a disagreement about empirical facts. Or does it just have to be the case that you ascribe to them emotions and qualia, and the actual reality of these terms is secondary?
Also:
Sure, in the scenario where we built line, one super-AI. If we have tens of thousands of cute cat girl AIs and they're capable of deception and also dangerous, then, uh. I mean. We're already super dead at this point. I give it even odds that the first humanlike catgirl AGI can convince its developer to give it carte blanche AWS access.
I think you are allowed to directly express your discontent in here instead of darkly hinting and vaguely problematizing my views. Speak plainly. If you imply I'm some kind of human supremacist(?) then I suppose I would not disagree, I would prefer for the human race to continue to thrive (again, much like the safetyists!), not bend itself over backwards in service to a race(?) of sentient(?) machines that would have never existed without human ingenuity in the first place.
(As an aside, I can't believe "human supremacist" isn't someone's flair yet.)
How is this even relevant? If this is a nod to ethics, I do not care no matter how complex the catgirls' inner workings become as that does not change their nature as machines built for humans by humans and I expect this to be hardwired knowledge for them as well, like with today's LLM assistants. If you imply that androids will pull a Judgement Day on us at some point, well, I've already apologized to the Basilisk in one of the posts below, not sure what else you expect me to say.
Since when did this turn into a factual discussion? Weren't we spitballing on android catgirls?
But okay, taking this at face value - as we apparently derived above, I'm a filthy human supremacist and humans are front and center in my view. Android catgirls are not humans. If they are capable of suffering, I 1) expect it to be minimized and/or made invisible by design, and 2) in any case will not be stirred by it in the way I am not stirred by the occasional tired whirring my 9 year old HDD emits when it loads things.
Don't misunderstand me - I'm capable of empathy and fully intend to treat my AIfus with care, but it's important to keep your eyes on the prize. I have no doubt that the future will bring new and exciting ethical quandaries to obsess over, but again much like the safetyists, I firmly believe humans must always come first. Anything else is flagrant hubris and inventing problems out of whole cloth.
If at some point science conclusively proves that every second of my PC being turned on causes exquisite agony on my CPU whose thermal paste hasn't been changed in a year, my calculus will still be unlikely to change. Would yours?
(This is why I hate getting into arguments involving AGI. Much speculation about essentially nothing.)
I do not understand the moral relevance of "built for humans by humans".
If I clarify that I am creating a child because I want a slave, does that change the moral calculus of enslaving my child?
If aliens came around and proved that they had seeded earth with DNA 4 billion years ago with a hidden code running in the background to ensure the creation of modern humans, and they made us to serve them as slaves, is it your position that they are totally morally justified in enslaving humanity?
What if humanity is the alien in the hypothetical and we seeded a planet with biological life to create a sub-species for the purpose of enslaving them?
Children belong to the human race, ergo enslaving them is immoral.
Again, I'm a human supremacist. Aliens can claim whatever they want, I do not care because I like existing, and if they attempt to justify an [atrocity] or some shit in these terms I can only hope people will treat them as, well, [atrocity] advocates (and more importantly, [crime]ers of fellow humans), and not as something like "rightful masters restoring their rule over Earth". I may be an accelerationist but not of that kind, thank you very much.
From what I understand this is essentially the android catgirl scenario rephrased, and similarly boils down to where humans fall in your order of importance. I struggle to understand how fellow humans can possibly not be number 1, but animal rights activists exist so I must be missing something.
For the record I do feel empathy towards animals (dog owner here), but not enough to influence my position on human supremacy.
I saw two different moral concepts gestured at in your post, one being human supremacy, the other was a vague sense that specifically because a machine is created by a person to be used by a person, this means that even if it is capable of being abused we are not morally wrong for abusing it.
So I was trying to dig into this idea that there is some sort of connection between the act of 'creating' something and the moral weight of abusing said thing. However with this clarification, I guess I was simply reading too much into your post.
Would you be opposed to someone keeping a dog locked in their basement for the purpose of fucking it? Would you consider that person a bad person? Would you be for or against your society trying to construct laws to prevent people from chaining dogs in their basement and fucking them?
No/no/against.
Well, assuming that he soundproofed the basement; I don't want to have to listen to it. And assuming it's not, y'know, someone else's stolen dog. Obvious failure states are obvious. But otherwise, I don't care. NMKBIOK.
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I'm not saying "abusing" my poor rusty HDD is morally right. I'm saying it's morally neutral, something that has no intrinsic moral weight and should not enter consideration (at least for me, I'm sure my fellow /g/oons would line up to fight me for daring to slander their AIfus). Once again, this does not mean I am going to open a sex dungeon or whatever the instant android catgirls become available, it just means I would be aware they are machines and my interactions with them would be bounded accordingly - e.g. I wouldn't immediately forfeit my mortal possessions and AWS credentials for equality or leverage or whatever, nor would I hesitate to fiddle with their inner workings if needed (like I do with chatbots now).
If you don't understand I honestly don't know how else to put it. You might as well shame people for abusing their furniture by, I don't know, not placing cushions under table legs?
I know what you are hinting at (the dog example especially feels like a last-minute word switch) and I assure you my time amongst degenerates has not diminished my disdain for pedos.
At this point I am quite desensitized to repulsive things people can be into and, as long as it's not my dog, wouldn't give much of a shit (aisde from actively staying out of public basement-dogfucking discourse).
Since I expect a follow-up turn of the ratchet: if they were my immediate neighbor I regularly encounter on walks with my own dog, I would likely report them, shame them or take some other action, but it wouldn't be of any particular remorse for their pet so much as I just don't like having degenerates for neighbors (source: lived on the same story with a mentally ill woman for most of my life). If they would get locked up and someone had to take care of their dog, I would definitely pass.
Dogfucking discourse is riveting but I can have that on 4chan, usually in a much more entertaining format. Can you just state the gotcha you're obviously goading me towards?
I was not specifically interested in the pedo/age aspect of 'child' but the sense in which a person 'creates' another person.
I really was trying to dig into the idea that because humans 'created' something that means something morally. For example, is there a moral difference between two men going into a futuristic IVF clinic and genetically designing a child and growing it in an artificial womb for the purpose of abusing it (waiting till it is 18 years old). Compared with two men genetically engineering an uplifted animal with similar mental faculties to a human for the purpose of abusing it (waiting till it is an 'adult'). For me, if 'creation' is a relevant term, these two things are indistinguishable on that front, they are distinguishable on the, one thing is a human and the other is not, which seems to be the actual point of consideration for you.
The dog fucking was a word replace for android cat girl fucking, dogs and android cat girls seem to be similarly positioned as, not human. I am not sure why you view dog fucking as 'degenerate' behavior given the moral principles you have laid out.
Both of your stated scenarios would tick off my vibes-based "degenerate" gut reaction before I could stop and consciously think on them, and on further reflection I don't think said gut reaction is too wrong here, so the choice (especially the claim of there being a moral difference, which in turn would imply any moral worth existing in either of the two couples) is entirely meaningless to me. As the young'uns say, miss me with that gay shit. My standards for degeneracy may be stretched pretty wide (pun not intended), but they're not infinite and I am not immune to
propagandavibes-based snap judgments. Total absence of those seems to be a common rationalist failure mode.Now this is rationalism.My patience for far-fetched thought experiments is likewise not infinite, I am not interested in discussing spherical cows in a vacuum, sorry. At least android catgirls are somewhat believable.Because while animals aren't #1 in my hierarchy, they're not at the bottom of it either (although definitely above HDDs). As I mentioned above I am not immune to vibes, and at some level I like cute doggos even with how dumb and, yes, non-human they are. If I didn't care for doggos I would've never owned one. Incidentally the last two sentences apply to chatbots as well, and I'm sure will apply to future android catgirls.
For the N-th time, I do not lack empathy, and I don't accept you imputing such a lack to me. I understand you are fully committed to springing some sort of gotcha on me, but please actually read my replies instead of engaging with the construct of me in your mind.
I am not sure what you think I am driving at beyond what I have stated.
I am fine with vague vibes based moral intuitions that are fuzzy around corner cases. I did not see you as having such a position. You seemed to be very strongly of the opinion that there was no evidence that you could ever see and no capability that an AI could ever have that would result in you ascribing it a moral worth such that keeping it in a state of sexual slavery would be wrong.
This, feels like a pretty hard line rule, and I wanted to try and understand just how generalizable this was, or how contingent it was on the various relevant categories, such as, human, non-human, biological, non-biological , the 'created for a purpose' axis that you introduced, etc.
I am not sure why uplift is beyond the pale in a conversation about AI capable of suffering, but if super smart chimps are off the table, what about aliens with similar intelligence to humans? I suspect that you would find enslaving intelligent, loving, crying, songwriting, dream having, despair feeling alien life forms morally wrong even if they are not morally equivalent to humans? Would they hold a different (higher?) moral position than dogs?
How many of those capabilities does an AI need to have before it would be wrong to enslave it? How important is the biological/synthetic distinction?
Again, for the argument here we are assuming that you are convinced the AI is really, meaningfully capable of feeling and experience suffering, not just that some AI ethics person is convinced that it is.
Or at least, it was that position, which I think is a fair reading of the quote/your post, that I was trying to engage with.
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Would you be fine with the MMAcevedo scenario?
I knew someone would bring up brain scans or somesuch sooner or later, I like thought experiments as much as the next rat-adjacent but this is getting too close to untethered sci-fi-esque speculation for my liking.
As humans and machines are firmly separate in my view, I would probably be hesitant to subject what was once a human to living as a machine does. If the next step of the gotcha is "but isn't immortality the ultimate human-flourishing-maximizing goal" - I heavily doubt so, I've tended to my grandparents' deathbeds and believe that at some point life already tends to turn into a horrifying parody of itself, so right now I believe I'd pass.
I mean the horrifying slavery of the brain scans, not the digitization as such.
The concept of digitization is already terrifying enough for me to nope the fuck out before even considering the possible applications, I've worked in QA for a couple years and I wouldn't touch whatever software would be used for digitization with a ten-foot pole even if it would've been written by fifty von Neumanns.
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