Comment by qarl

1 day ago

Any time I bump into a device that acts like a human I'm going to treat it like a human.

Because treating things that act human inhumanely is not something I want to learn how to do.

15 comments

qarl

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Brendinooo  1 day ago

My instincts are pretty different here.

- I'll try not to swear at/hit a printer: not because I see the printer as having human-like qualities of being capable but complex and unreliable, but because I want to be a person who can control his temper.

- Treating an inhuman thing as human because it can mimic us in some way is not something that I want to do.

  • qarl  1 day ago

    So if a machine does become conscious, you're happy being nasty to it until it is proven conscious?

    I try not to make errors like that.

    • hn_acc1  1 day ago

      Yes. I'm currently not convinced it can ever be so. So until I hear something convincing to the contrary, I believe no machine can be conscious / sentient unless mimicking human behavior. And if it mimics human behavior intentionally, I have to ask why - and the answer is probably to get me to trust / use it more.

      I was bright-eyed and excited about tech once. Like back in 1982 when I got my first home computer and thought CPUs were part magic. Now I know how machines work from the transistor level up to neural nets. There's nothing magical about it. And no consciousness.

      Having seen the mockery that the finance-bros have made of "pure tech" (i.e. Jobs instead of Woz, Ellison instead of Joy, etc) and all the enshittification just for pure $$$, I'm leery of ANYTHING ANY tech company tells me anymore.

      Now, do I believe that possibly "consciousness" is some kind of state of a super-circuit (our brains)? Sure. Can we emulate that on a computer? We can't even emulate a pebble on a computer (not simulate, emulate). We can SIMULATE what we THINK brains are, but we can't emulate a real one. Not even close, not for many decades.

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cmrdporcupine  1 day ago

This is in fact the danger with these human-simulating "AI"s we have now...

People get used to treating human-like, human emulating machines with either disrespect or in a command/control/master fashion, because that's the nature of the tooling.

And then potentially by extent/blurring of lines they then treat other people like machines.

Which is already a thing people do to other people.

I just fear it gets worse.