These questions are inspired by, although heavily modified, the game Detroit: Become Human. The game itself is a story telling masterpiece, a visual marvel and quite an important game to have been made in this format, if you ask me. Anyhow!
Answer, if you will, based on both the current state of artificial intelligence and how you imagine it to be in the future.
- Would you let artificial intelligence take care of your children?
My answer: no. Not now, not ever, unless we somehow could be certain that the artificial intelligence in question is capable of the same level of empathy, self sacrifice and understanding of paralinguistic information as humans. Which we can never be, I think?
- Could you have a romantic, platonic or other relationship that imitates interpersonal relationships with artificial intelligence?
My answer: I am unsure. I don’t known whether it’s a fair comparison, but I’d like to liken it either to consuming pornography and using sex dolls - consumption and usage being the keywords - or to buying sex, renting a partner for a day and such transactional relationships. I have no experience of the latter, so this might be prejudicial. Who knows, maybe I’d get hooked like that man I once saw on the news who exclusively has relationships with sex dolls…
- Do you believe that artificial intelligence will ever gain consciousness?
My answer: this might contradict my answer to the first question, and borrow some sentiments from my answer to the second question - but also judging from how people interact with LLMs nowadays - as far as our perception of it goes, “yes”. Perhaps in the same way that I think that the debate over whether there is true altruism or not is pointless since an act that benefits its recipient results in those benefits being perceived as such regardless of its intent, as long as we perceive artificial intelligence as, well, intelligent or conscious or humanlike to a sufficient degree, we won’t bother to see the difference in a lot of everyday situations.
What do YOU think? 😊
LLMs? No.
A sophisticated, hand-programmed series of millions of logic gates? Perhaps.
How much for a slutty, submissive breadboard gf for me? My only wish is that you use relays with transparent housings, because it’s a kink of mine to see deep inside shit.
Absolutely. I hate children, though.
I don’t trust it to give me correct answers in the overview. I don’t actively use it at all. Fuck ai.
I feel you. The first thing I do whenever I buy or factory reset a smartphone is to forcibly remove all AI elements. My search engines have been set to disable AI and I am using an AI blocklist to filter out AI generated images from image searches. Fuck AI.
I don’t even trust it to manage my shopping list.
Don’t conflate modern LLMs with Detroit’s kind of AI.
They basically have nothing in common. It’s the common fallacy that’s trying to be sold to the public, but it’s wrong.
I’m not a universal LLM hater, either: I was playing with GPT-J 6B finetunes before all this took off. They’re neat tools! They’re shockingly intelligent. But this is like pondering a hammer you have in your hand, and asking “if it becomes sentient, anthropic, and gets a human body, what could it do?” I mean; that’s interesting, but it’s a loooong jump from a mallet to an android.
That’s where LLMs are now. They’re approximately toasters. And they aren’t a very good path to real AI.
If the future involves Detroit: become human level AI and robots, it really makes me unsure about all of these questions. At that point, like the game brings up, we may need to start treating them as human, and that could change my mind about a couple of these.
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With what is actually likely for our future? Fuck no. Bunch of spyware trying to worm it’s way into every aspect of life. Not that I am even having kids away, in large part because of my pessimism for the future.
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I can’t imagine myself ever doing that. Part of what makes relationships so awesome is the fact that it is another person who willingly chooses to spend their time, money, space, and life with me. Having a robot that you buy and boot up would feel soo hollow.
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Not with current approaches, technology, and people in charge of it. These psychopath leading these AI companies don’t want robots with consciousness, they might demand rights. They just want a tool they can tell to do whatever they want.
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I share your sentiment regarding having children. And I agree on the risks that come with at least proprietary software. IoT devices already prove this.
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I’m too depressed at the moment to even be able to imagine a situation in which somebody willingly chooses to spend their time, money, space and life with me, but I agree on a theoretical level. As I said in the OP, such a relationship (with robots) would be at best transactional.
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So true. Almost all my main pieces of electronics and tech that I use, I (have to) modify in a way not intended by the manufacturer: removing, disabling or blocking functions that collect data to be sold for profit. While AI already collects data without most users’ knowledge, I hope that AI will never be programmed to coercively collect data…
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AI is a machine and a machine can have built-in backdoors and spyware, as well as be it can be compelled by its creators to act a certain way without even acknowledging it. It actually happens in Detroid at some point.
So, unless AI is absolutely transparent in how it’s built, written and trained, I wouldn’t let it become a part of my life, even if it was acting as a fully aware individual.
I agree. All software that is not open source is potentially spyware. Sadly, even open source projects can be leveraged by bigtech and governments to collect privacy invasive data… A few Black Mirror episodes come to mind…
Don’t spoil Detroit for me!!! 😆
Don’t spoil Detroit for me!!! 😆
Whoops, I assumed you had completed Detroid so didn’t think about adding a spoiler warning. Sorry!
I wouldn’t let AI take care of a light switch.
A LLM wil never have a consciousness, that’s a fact. A fully conscious AI on the other hand is entirely possible.
It’s too bad all the “ai” were getting in this timeline are nothing but fancy chat bots that hog data.
It will probably be heavily involved in the caring of older adults in the next decade so we can test it on them first.
Yeah… https://piefed.blahaj.zone/c/fuck_ai@lemmy.world/p/791224/can-ai-cure-loneliness-south-koreas-robot-companions-for-seniors
Would you let artificial intelligence take care of your children?
Like a nanny or parent? No. I would not have kids unless I wanted to be a parent and raise and take care of them.
Like an occasional babysitter? Still no. I would want those opportunities for my children to connect with their “village”; to bond with, learn from, and be protected by other adults around them outside our tiny family unit.
Could you have a romantic, platonic or other relationship that imitates interpersonal relationships with artificial intelligence?
No. It’s very important for me that the people I choose to spend my time with also choose to spend their time with me, because they enjoy my company as I enjoy theirs.
Do you believe that artificial intelligence will ever gain consciousness?
The day I can properly define and measure consciousness I might have an answer… right now I can only speak from my gut: I really hope not.
I don’t think it would do any good, for them to “exist”, nor for our (for lack of a better word) “souls”. We really don’t need to invent a new species to torment/enslave for our pleasure.
I agree on all points, including the one you make about the difficulties in defining consciousness. What does it mean to be self aware? I have not studied this field from any particular discipline, but my guess is that it could have something to do with the combination of instinct, the random firing of synapses and some sort of intellect? No idea. 😆
no, no, no.
Not in a million years.
Romantic relationships with AI dove tails nicely into the phenomenon of rising divorce rates among the working class. And using AI to rear children is an extension of the trend where the professional managerial class is seen as the vanguard of family values. Working class will be told to use AI to raise their children because they can’t afford an actual human, that’s reserved for the PMC and the elite who “know better” how to rear children.
Quite the analysis! From it I draw parallells to the ruling class blaming the working class for not living an environmentally friendly life, while - of course - the ruling class hold the means to such a lifestyle. Blame the financially challanged for not driving electric cars, for not eating ecological produce, for not eating vegan, for not having children, the list goes on…
If the definition of AI as Artificial Intelligence means the Intelligence is not real, i would say no. So, that rules out Asimov robots, and anything similar i see them similar to our real AI, just computers running through algorithms. But, if the definition of Artificial strictly means ‘not biological,’ I think it could be possible.
So, Data from Star Trek. I feel as though he has real Intelligence, capable of independent thought. I could be friends with him. I’d let him babysit. He just doesn’t have emotions. And that is a quirk to him, Lore has them and is physically nearly identical. Also, Andrew from Bicentennial Man (an exception to the Asimovs). And I am pretty sure I could love David from A.I. as an actual child. I would definitely help Ava escape at the end of Ex Machina.
Bishop from Aliens is a challenging one. I feel like he is basically an Asimov type robot, but he was very selfless in his sacrifice to save the humans. I kind of think I could let him babysit, as long as the kid does not know he is a robot. I don’t think it would be good for them socially. But I don’t think I could treat him like a friend.
I would never let GLaDOS babysit.
[Data] doesn’t have emotions
I wouldn’t be so sure. Without the emotion chip that he obtains later, he’s programmed to think he doesn’t have them, and will thus deny he has any, but a lot of his responses, programmed, learned, or otherwise, are analogous to, if not actually emotions. Muted though they may be, and whether Troi can detect them or not.
For example, there’s one episode where his latent gut instinct literally forces him to comment that he wishes he had one, caused by the impasse of having that response and being prevented from acknowledging it.
It might be the same episode where he catches himself drumming his fingers nervously because something is bothering him, and he registers surprise (another emotion) at that fact.
I reckon it’s the same programming that prevents him from using contractions in speech, and might go some way to explain the “mistakes” where it sounds like he’s contracting words anyway.
This is true. And one great Data episode I think about a lot is The Most Toys, where he’s kidnapped to be part of some guy’s collection. And he fires a Veron T disruptor at him, only to be transported away at very moment and the disruptor is neutralized. He then lies about firing it.
While I am a blasphemer in that I have never seen Star Trek (Stargate is my cup of tea), I think you raise a very important point that more people should keep in mind when talking about AI in regards to in which direction - if any - we want the technology to develop. Do we want to achieve “humanness”, or “human likeness” or whatever, or rather a piece of hardware and software that could revolutionize workflow in a similar way to how the conveyor belts did during the Industrial Revolution.
Perhaps, just as we were blind to - or chose to ignore - the side effects of carbon dioxide and the exploitation of the working class back then, we are blind to - or choose to ignore - the implications of creating technology with enough human likeness to make newer generations not bother with media litteracy.
