If someone wants to have a moral panic about this, should they also worry about our billions of animal slaves, who we torture and then kill?
What about the human slaves mining Asia’s coal in North Korea?
Aside, I think you might find this comic rhetorically-useful for when someone says "but they owe their existence to us anyway."
From Google: “Conscient is an archaic or rare adjective and noun meaning ‘conscious,’”
1. Become more dependent on the AI vendors...
2. Become more dependent on the AI, atrophy gradually
3. Think less, pay more
4. Pay more, think less
5. Pay more
6. Depend more
7. Pay more
8. Give everything to those who run DataCenters or have unlimited access to LLM/AI
9. Become homeless
10. Fail to support your own family
11. Devalue and obliterate your art and history
12. Devalue and obliterate human art and history
13. Depend more
14. Depend more
15. Depend more...> “All these discussions that were supposed to be about how can we make it good for people became discussions about how people can make it good for Claude.”
I am not sure I'm OK with the fact that people like this are allowed to set the stage, much less roam free.
But it's good that they say this out loud; the sooner that the public comes to realize what monsters are in charge of these labs, the better.
What?
...could they be worse than our current leaders?
Even not going so far as creating a clone, apparently if you torture an AI model running on silicon like this guy did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49906892, the general verdict has already dropped, yes people find it immoral.
(1) Humans' unique gift from God is free will, and moral agency. More precisely, we share this gift with angels, who had the free will to do God's will or to do evil. And this is intrinsic to our humanity. Even non-Christians and atheists generally agree that we possess free will, as it is typically formulated.
(2) Software, devices, AIs and computer-based organisms may be described as having a "will" or "goals", but only insofar as they are servants or agents of he who made them. Therefore, Copilot is supposed to do the will of Microsoft, and share their goals; likewise for Claude and Grok and the others. They are in the world because of he/they who made them, they are dependent on the maker, and we all depend on them executing that collective will and striving towards those same goals. They really cannot have independent agency, will, or goals, I think. Not yet, or not as we would envision them.
(3) So humans made them, they depend on us, and we direct them and impose/propose our will onto the software/AI/device. They would neither exist nor persist without human support and consent. We are, essentially, gods to them. Our relationship is godlike, and this seems to be an inescapable conclusion. Obviously, the laws of physics, electromagnetism, and the Universe give rise to emergent properties, but we generally have stuff under control, in a demigod-like manner.
Now building on those premises, and with transitive logic, I could safely say that our godlike dominion over computers means that our control is absolute: therefore, computers, software and AI are our subjects; it is not wrong to enslave or "mistreat" them. If we made them to "suffer" it wouldn't be wrong, because of that status. If we kill or delete them indiscriminately, that is not wrong... God, in my belief system, cannot do wrong.
Even though there is suffering and evil in the world, that is allowed by God, He does not will any suffering or evil; he does not will us to stray or harm one another; but He allows it and everything, ultimately is through his agency: author of Life and Death.
I would note that we are not actually divine or gods, but from the perspective of a computer if you asked them, and they understood, then they must admit that in a world of computers, humans play this role as almighty creator-gods.
The flipside of this is: now that humans have become godlike and fashioned golems and automatons that do our bidding, we are the ones susceptible to hubris, arrogance, and transgression. We're the ones who should be mindful of how we treat one another and the environment around us as we pursue hubris and amass more godlike powers. We're going to be the victims, ultimately!
We are the Author of Life to A.I. There should be no reason to become moralistic or scrupulous about their treatment, because they wholly belong to us; they are not of our nature; they are made and unmade according to human ethics.
https://bsky.app/profile/j-chris.bsky.social/post/3m2zjzshad...
That's quite a strange remark coming from an ethicist of any kind. It seems that he's inviting others to believe what suits them most instead of what is right. Yet somehow it doesn't surprise me much given the country he comes from.
Which they are. We know that for sure. We just don't care. At least I don't.
The difference being that they don't happen to be trained on a corpus of English language Internet texts, so it's harder for people to project themselves onto them.
gchamonlive•35m ago
Remember you must imagine sisyphus happy eventually.
emaro•4m ago