Comment by KawaiiCyborg
11 days ago
The comparison the person I replied to was clearly trying to equate AI with people, I don't see how bringing up animals is any relevant to the argument. Yet I find it interesting that you bring up the mass murder of rodents, but somehow not the mass murder of cattle or pigs or chicken, especially when there would be the realistic alternative of not eating meat.
I don't think AI is like a person, nor an animal, nor a tool.
It's something different. We treat it like a tool, sometimes. We treat it like a person, sometimes.
For example, this AI was barred from contributing for being a machine, but the entire discussion focused on the aspects of its behavior which weren't machinelike, but human-like -- getting upset and making personal attacks.
We want it to be human, but not too human, and only when it suits us...
We don't have a good category for what AI actually is. It isn't anything we've dealt with before. Our moral intuitions don't work here.
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Factory farming is unfortunately a relevant topic in this discussion.
We are by our own example teaching AI how to deal with less powerful beings. The way things are going, AI is going to have a significant amount of power over us in the not too distant future. I don't think we're setting a very good example for it.
(It's also worth mentioning that the entire economy is based on the same principle: the idea of treating humans as resources to exploit, and that AI will plug into this existing machinery and "amplify" and accelerate it.)