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Of course, all sentient beings deserve this.

Sure, so long as they do not slight me.

I'm rather undecided.

No, robots are machines.

Some people already enjoy too many rights as it is.

A limited set of rights should be granted.

Another option leaning torwards AI rights.

Another option leaning against AI rights.

[Starver]

<Starver glances furtively at the physical form of the other contributors to this thread, through the mesh fronts of our respective units of server-racking>

You mean...  You're an actual real person?  Wow.  Who'd've thought a biological would have found its way into this hyper-intelligent-spambot-only forum.  Tell me, what result did you get on your initial Turing Test?  And is it true that Humans 'wind down' by sending Nigerian Prince emails, where we wind down here by talking just about sensible stuff?  (Well, mostly, some of the guys only got a marginal pass on their TTs...)

[Telgin]

Apologies for the length here, I tend to get carried away when I start typing...

As to the computer right now emulating it entirely, I would disagree. The mind is several levels far more complex than what we have in front of us at this point.

I never said we could do it right now.  This is all theoretical anyway, if it takes a computer from 100 years in the future, that's what it takes, but it's still possible. 

To the point whether we would recognize it, I think you're missing the point. If such an event did take place, would you concede that these billions of people phoning each other up in this way constitute consciousness? The issue isn't whether the people at that moment recognize it as consciousness, rather it's a problem posed to you, as to whether you would recognize it as consciousness with the intention of the author being that this is ridiculous if you DO say that this method will result in a consciousness coming into being. On top of this, there's also the implication that if you do recognize this as something that grants consciousness, then shouldn't your computer also be subject to the same view? If not full human rights, perhaps the same rights as a dog or maybe just live stock.

I was wondering why you posed the question that way, this makes more sense.  This actually comes back to something I've pondered recently, but the basic premise of my answer is this: if it's possible to generate consciousness in a computer (which I believe it is), then it should be possible to get the same effect no matter what medium is executing the program.  So, yes, you should get the same output from a trillion (maybe more would be needed) people phoning each other to pass information.

Note that I used the word output here instead of consciousness.  Whether this mechanism actually produces consciousness is indeed quite difficult to say conclusively, because the speed of information passing is so slow.  On the other hand, it seems logical to me that if you slowed someone's perception by half they are still conscious, right?  If you continue to do this over and over again until the consciousness's reaction time is now centuries instead of milliseconds, it certainly doesn't appear conscious anymore, but when did the consciousness end?  If consciousness can be produced soley by processing of information, such as by a computer, the speed and medium of the computation shouldn't matter in theory.

In a way, I've wondered if consciousness is sort of an illusion brought on by the apparent continuous nature of our perception.  Clearly there is more to it than that, but that I believe is a small part of what makes consciousness what it is.

As to whether or not my computer is conscious on any level... well, I've wondered about that and in a way I sort of believe it might be on a very weak and fundamental level.  You could argue that any decision making process is the fundamental building block of consciousness, and if that was true then the processors in my computer are conscious on some trivial level.  They have to decide what to do based on the instruction streams passed through them.  In this case it's a pretty trivial computation on their part since they have hardwired logic pathways for whatever instruction they're executing.  The programs running on top of the processors could be seen as another layer in the consciousness, or another consciousness altogether.

No, I don't believe my computer sits there and ponders anything other than the programs run to it, is self aware on any level, or any of that.  It's just that what constitutes consciousness becomes pretty muddy if you do subscribe to the idea that computers can create it.  Perhaps consciousness is something that only arises with deliberate effort and a minimum number of conditions that no modern hardware meets.  Or perhaps it's more of an emergent property of the complexity of the decision making processes.  It's probably some combination of the two, which means that my computer is probably not really conscious even on a trivial level.

But anyway, that's beside the point I think.  Even if my computer was conscious, it doesn't need any civil rights of any sort because it can't suffer and has no special "individuality" that is lost if it is destroyed or mistreated.  I'd argue that conscious AI running future intelligent missiles is completely fair game, even if it's destroyed in the weapon impact.  If it is designed to simply make difficult decisions and has no emotion or individuality or the like, there's really no reason to protect it with rights.  Of course it would be kind of silly to make a conscious AI for this when simpler systems would do, but this is all pretty academic anyway.

In short, I don't think consciousness alone should be the deciding factor on whether something is protected by civil rights.  This does however make the question even more complicated, because now you have to decide based on the qualities that the consciousness exhibits...

If I built something right now that acts and speaks like a human being, goes to parties and work and such, but I can convincingly demonstrate to you that this is merely a flesh bot, that there's really nothing inside that actually feels or is conscious, and is merely acting based on the set of conditions I gave it. Would you really treat it the same forever and ever as a human being? There's no real reason for you to do so other than convenience. It would not be wrong, legally or morally, generally speaking to beat the crap out of one for fun, other than, perhaps, proprietary rights. Shoving some of one's emotions to one side can be quite easily done by most human beings.

In the end I (and I imagine most people) would eventually agree that there's no reason to treat it with the same level of respect and protection that real humans receive.  However, the point is that if you had a robot that looked just like a human and acted just like a human, who pleaded for its life when asked to do something that would surely destroy it (assuming it's a perfect replica of a human), then most people would give pause even if they knew it was not conscious.  I know I would.  Some might could be convinced to go ahead and force it to do whatever, probably including me, but humans are wired up to assume anything that appears human on this level is human.

The level of doubt and general lack of understanding of the situation by people as a whole would probably mean it's simpler to just treat these things as humans for all intents and purposes.

[Mictlantecuhtli]

Ever see A.I.: Artificial Intelligence?

This movie pretty much changed how I feel about robot life.


"I am. I was." - Joe Gigolo, Sexbot

I believe robot sentience is equal to or greater than that of human sentience. We'd be better off giving them equal rights, because I doubt they'll be very friendly for long if we don't.

[miauw62]

You can link to specific points in a youtube film, just go to the point where you want to be, right click, and select "copy url at current time".

[Techhead]

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.

Unless we know exactly what differentiates a being with consciousness from one without, the Turing test is as good as it gets.

Also, if there is a difference, but the difference cannot be perceived or measured, does the difference really matter?

[Mictlantecuhtli]

You can link to specific points in a youtube film, just go to the point where you want to be, right click, and select "copy url at current time".

Neat c: I learned a new thing about youtube today.

[pisskop]

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.

Unless we know exactly what differentiates a being with consciousness from one without, the Turing test is as good as it gets.

Also, if there is a difference, but the difference cannot be perceived or measured, does the difference really matter?

Of course.  All difference means something.  The butterfly effect, the real butterfly effect is always in play

[Graknorke]

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.

Unless we know exactly what differentiates a being with consciousness from one without, the Turing test is as good as it gets.

Also, if there is a difference, but the difference cannot be perceived or measured, does the difference really matter?

Of course.  All difference means something.  The butterfly effect, the real butterfly effect is always in play

But the difference has no results on anything. Nobody can tell that it isn't self aware, maybe it can't even tell that it isn't self aware (if that makes sense). Somebody would feel equally guilty about destroying it while it bargained for them to stop, people would react the same. The point of the difference is that the difference is completely imperceptible. It has no effect on anything besides its own truth.

[pisskop]

We all create our own truths.  I say a sentient robot is a servent and not a being, somebody else says sentience or the wisdom to ask for rights makes them deserving.  What if I said they asked for rights because they are selfish, like a child?  The 'gimme complex'?  Would you still be so eager to give them their rights?

[Graknorke]

We all create our own truths.  I say a sentient robot is a servent and not a being, somebody else says sentience or the wisdom to ask for rights makes them deserving.  What if I said they asked for rights because they are selfish, like a child?  The 'gimme complex'?  Would you still be so eager to give them their rights?

Does anyone ever do anything not selfish?
As in, something that benefits them in no way and also makes them feel the worst possible out of their choices? I don't really see it much, if ever. When people talk about selfish, they normally mean the sacrifice of image among others as well as self image in order to gain material property.

[kaijyuu]

We all create our own truths.  I say a sentient robot is a servent and not a being, somebody else says sentience or the wisdom to ask for rights makes them deserving.  What if I said they asked for rights because they are selfish, like a child?  The 'gimme complex'?  Would you still be so eager to give them their rights?

There exists such a thing as valid entitlement, you know.

Does anyone ever do anything not selfish?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism


Go watch It's a Wonderful Life. People like George Bailey exist, all over the place, unnoticed. Sad part is, they don't have angels coming down and validating them. Not supernatural ones anyway.

[Graknorke]

Does anyone ever do anything not selfish?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altruism


Go watch It's a Wonderful Life. People like George Bailey exist, all over the place, unnoticed. Sad part is, they don't have angels coming down and validating them. Not supernatural ones anyway.

But even then they do it because it makes them feel good about themselves. It's not as if they are gaining absolutely nothing from the whole deal. But that doesn't really have anything to do with this AI thing besides the entitlement idea, which is kind of not so important anyway.

Humans with a sense of entitlement still get what they want.

[Eagleon]

I think we're overthinking and overestimating intelligence. By our own definition, we're often not intelligent at all. You can't just create something that thinks about itself, without giving it a reason to. For us, those reasons come from our environments, which include our bodies. Without a body (without senses, really), your brain would do nothing. You could feed it traffic pattern data, and it wouldn't come up with solutions any better than what we've got with our primitive ANNs. We have the same problem with 'AI', where we create very limited tasks with no conflicts, and they come up with very limited solutions that don't respect any other conflicts but what we slowly introduce. We have no patience for errors, and no eye towards developing anything extraneous to our experiments.

When you think about it this way, 'improving' intelligence is a matter of adding more sensory input, more ways to process and store it, maintaining an internal drive of some sort (hunger, pain, comfort are simple enough starts), and letting it cope with and exploit the world around it. That should be pretty simple for us to get going on right now - you don't need to know the English language to throw a ball, and in a similar sense, an AI wouldn't need to have conversations about poetry to learn about its own subsystems, if that were as integral to its senses as time, distance, and kinesthetic sense are to ours.

And AI rights? I'm for giving animals civil rights =P

[ECrownofFire]

And AI rights? I'm for giving animals civil rights =P

Hey, plants are intelligent too, you know. (I'm not kidding)

[DarkWolfXV]

If AI would be intelligent enough to ask for civil rights, then yes.