Episode 1

My view of life is absolutely not secular. 🧚

Could you finish answering the question in any event?

Life & death are an inseparable duality. If A.I. can't die, than it is not alive.

How do you define death?

Should I take your silence as disbelief? I did have a near death experience. Can you imagine an A.I. describing such a thing? Unless it is programmed to say so or repeating the recounted experience of someone on the web, that won't happen.

I’ll answer the question posed to the Left.

This is an updated version of an older debate involving animal consciousness — what rights are possessed by animals, and what obligations we owe toward them. Beyond the scope for me to discuss all that, but it’s a fascinating topic.

AI chatbots have become quite sophisticated lately, able to churn out 5-paragraph essays that would fool most graders. There are also stories of people, even software engineers, getting “duped” into proclaiming that the chatbot on the other end is conscious, even when they know that they’re just talking to a machine. This is a pretty disturbing harbinger for how humans could soon be manipulated by other humans operating AIs, for political or criminal or fraudulent purposes.

We can go back several decades to when computer AIs became sophisticated enough to beat World Chess Champions. Did that mean they were “alive” or “conscious”? No, it just meant the software engineers designed a program that was better able at solving “the puzzle” of chess.

Instant-messaging, essay composition, future intelligence challenges for AI — they can also be thought of as “puzzles.” While an AI script can be written to excel at a discrete challenge, it may be a long time, perhaps never, that an AI can be coded to excel at *all* the tasks that a typical human being can do. Even then, would it really be a consciousness on the level of a human being, or just excelling at the task of “human being”?

As much as we might *wish* for a creation of ours to become “alive” — the same impulse that has us feverishly (and so far, fruitlessly) scanning the galaxy for signs of intelligent life elsewhere — I’m skeptical of claims that it can really be done, let alone any time soon.

In the meantime, we are failing badly at caring for billions of people around the world who are indisputably alive, as well as the *future* generations of tens of billions of humans who stand to be greatly impacted by the environmental decisions we’re making right now.

Let’s get humanism right first. Then we can work on “rights” for AI, if the technology ever reaches that point.

Reference:

https://www.iflscience.com/the-eliza-effect-how-a-chatbot-convinced-people-it-was-real-way-back-in-the-1960s-64155

Were you taking into consideration the AI models that have been given human rights? Or, the art created by AI-Midjourney?

What constitutes as "Life" to you?

For now I’m a biological essentialist, though open to changing my mind upon very convincing evidence. Life has to come about in the usual way. Biological procreation.

AI scripts that are generated for a specific purpose, to solve a puzzle, entertain, or even manipulate, don’t qualify no matter how sophisticated.

What does it mean that such programs can be installed and uninstalled? Turned on and off at will? Replicated thousands of times? These aren’t things that are compatible with a biological understanding of life.

I don’t think we’ve yet reached the point of any AIs that might be considered “alive.” And of course, “life” isn’t determinative of the question of “rights.” Bacteria don’t have rights, most animals don’t have “rights” (though some of the mammals nearest and dearest to us are given humane treatment, and criminal penalties for those who abuse them.) And as we know from the abortion debate, the question of a fetus’s “rights” is hotly contested.

For now I think there’s more of a danger of “rights” getting ahead of the science than vice-versa. The whole “corporations are people” fiction, now being applied to what are fundamentally corporate products. Placing those on a level with humans is bound to ultimately devalue human life.

"What is your attitude with Alien life? What if instead of being carbon based, it is silicon (or lithium) based?" This would be an excellent follow up question for next weeks topic, thus adding more to consider regarding the discussion of AI.