Solarpunk technology @slrpnk.net max @lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 mo. ago

Sympathy for the Machine | Curious Archive

a cool video i think is tagnentially related to solarpunk meows!

robots get workers rights too for betterment of all!!

13 comments

The subject deserves a better treatment than this relatively shallow pop-scifi video. This has been a question in science-fiction for more than a century. No, it did not start with Star Trek, Asimov dates it as far back as 1818 Frankenstein. If you are bold you can see this theme in the 2000 years old story of Talos, the bronze colossus that wanted immortality (ancient Greece was surprisingly full of automatons, Rhodes was known for them).

The question is what does imbue humans with what makes us see them as humans? Please don't use the word "soul". It is meaningless and religious, does not refer to any observable thing.

And don't use "intelligence" as an interchangeable word with that undefined property, that most sci-fi authors have took to call "sentience". That word is not human-centric and they typically apply sentience or the question of sentience to aliens or machines.

We have a hard time seeing as sentient something that has zero sense of ego. You can make an extremely intelligent machine with no ego, no sense of self. This is what you have in LLMs.

Giving them a sense of self and ego is probably feasible, but it is both useless and a huge responsibility. Maybe will happen first as an art project, but then you have to question the morality of creating something that does not want to die (or at least expresses it) but is not recognized as a person.

It also interrogates our notion of the linearity of the self. If such a sentient being can be forked, suspended, copied, have memories wiped out, fake memories implanted, personality changed, willingly or unwillingly, that opens a lot of philosophical questions.

I wish the community would embrace them, but so far all we have had are extremely superficial debates over "true" intelligence, usually defined as the difference between what humans can do and machines can do, an ever-shrinking territory.
- For me the first Ghost in the Shell movie (the anime, obviously) is the standard when it comes to these questions (though it's of course not the first).
  
  For me it stopped when it started getting interesting.
  
  And "ghosts" are such a cop out to not talk about the hard questions.
  
  Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love GitS which is a stunning piece of art, but it barely scratched the surface.
- is shallow, because is introduction to topic hehe. is meant to spark curiousity in approach ble way. posting literary essays onn ai would probably not fit so well here hehe >w<
  
  Been there, done that :-)
  
  30 minutes of video is a lot of time to go a bit deeper, especially if you assume the audience knows half of the movies mentioned.
Yo, we can't even recognize human rights, as a species. Good luck getting anyone to recognize bot rights - especially when those (at least in our current state of tech) directly interfere with human rights.
- human rights not being recognised an issue with the system, not humanity i thinks. if we nice to robots, maybe they help us change it an love can win :3
  
  I think it actually may be a human failing, because human rights have been iffy as hell for all of recorded civilization. This is why it is argued by some that robots could be superior and consider us as too errant to allow continued existence. Perhaps, having an exactly defined and unwavering moral code, actually will make them superior and also save our asses. It seems like the reason human rights keep being disrespected is that people kinda just do whatever they want, and it seems like half the time what they want is cruel or harmful. I think until we find a way to increase mass empathy, our species is definitely gonna keep harming itself until it (and probably everything else) goes extinct. I feel robots (actually existing) are kind of antithetical to empathy, especially under capitalism, especially while made of hazardous materials that require ripping up the earth. I do however think discussion and content of this subject really opens up the dialogue on rights of all intelligent beings and the definitions of intelligence itself and I find that very important. I think we should perhaps be at this time more focused towards expanding the rights of humans and animals before robots, though. Like, this subject is so "getting ahead of ourselves", as Solarpunks, that it's almost kinda funny. Strikes me more as Cyberpunk territory, really.
Curious Archive has some extremely good videos, this is one of them. Have been subbed to him for a while, truly quality content!
Nice video, thanks for sharing it!
- ur welcome :3

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