Same, personhood isn’t limited to humans. If you can be a best friend or confidant or true co-companion that is mutually beneficial and mutually understood, that’s all I need to know there’s a person in there. I’ll even extend it to other animals that exhibit complex thought, considerations, relflective behavior, but I don’t push that on other human people, if they want to join me in doing so, they’re my kind of people. The more the merrier. I feel bad for people who can’t see animals that earned their friendship as fiends, as people.
Where the waters really get muddy is in deciding where to draw the line between ‘person’ and ‘not a person’ when it comes to AI.
Current AI is almost certainly not a person … but at some point, it seems almost inevitable that it will progress to the point where it crosses the line of personhood. Where do we draw that line? How will we know if an AI has crossed it? And how do we address the rights and responsibilities of an artificial person? Is it then unethical to turn it off or delete it? Is it okay to turn it off as long as you intend to turn it back on later? Should it have a say in government, be able to vote? Can you get married to it? Does it have a right to create copies of itself the way you have a right to have children? Is it unethical to make copies of it without its consent? Can it own property? Can it own copyrights to ‘creative’ works it produces? Does allowing a corporation to own it and tell it what to do amount to slavery? Do we have an obligation to provide it with server space and electricity if it can’t provide those for itself? Can/should it be punished if it breaks laws, and how?
Hey, man. I don’t make much effort to keep up with the bleeding edge of AI development, and I also don’t know exactly how to define a ‘person’. Cut me some slack.
Fair point. But I’d say regardless of how much advancement is made in (realistic nowadays) AI, it will never even be close to being a person. It can not even be remotely argued that AI is “12% of a person”. It’s a category difference. Even given our lack of understanding of the meatphysics involved, we know at least enough about the world to come up with an empiric definition of “person” and I’d say the most viable interpretations (“living organism of sufficient and demonstrable complexity characterized by homologation and similarity to the traits of the hominid self”) readily discounts AI for the foreseeable future.
living organism of sufficient and demonstrable complexity characterized by homologation and similarity to the traits of the hominid self
No AI could ever qualify for that, no matter how advanced, because it’s not a ‘living organism’.
And you’d definitely want to be more clear about what ‘homologation’ means, because ‘similarity to the traits of the hominid self’ is very vague and it could potentially be argued that current AI already does that.
There’s also the huge question of how much complexity is ‘sufficient’…
I mean, sure, I’ll hope the definitions that are going about the metaphilosophy circles are clearer, I’m just mentioning a definition that seems to fall in line with the kinds of that we can readily use to measure personhood with our very limited arsenal and very limited sample size; in terms of species that have persons, we have been stuck at N=1 for the entirely of human history. “Baby’s first N=2” might be quite awesome if it ever happens, but unless we have deciphered the metaphysics of metaphilosophy (like, what a mind actually is, or being able to reproduce the biological processes that spawn sapience in a minimum viable example experiment), the only way we will be currently able to recognize the chance of personhood is if it is “human enough”: like-ours hands that enable tool use, like-ours language and expression that can serve as strata for a culture, like-ours means of suffering that can be palliated and can generate and teach empathy, like-ours amplitude of facial expression that allows for a reading of emotions.
With the definition given, AI is conveniently and clearly discarded, as are corporations. We already have enough issue with our legal systems treating corporations as if they were people, we certainly don’t need more.
Same, personhood isn’t limited to humans. If you can be a best friend or confidant or true co-companion that is mutually beneficial and mutually understood, that’s all I need to know there’s a person in there. I’ll even extend it to other animals that exhibit complex thought, considerations, relflective behavior, but I don’t push that on other human people, if they want to join me in doing so, they’re my kind of people. The more the merrier. I feel bad for people who can’t see animals that earned their friendship as fiends, as people.
Where the waters really get muddy is in deciding where to draw the line between ‘person’ and ‘not a person’ when it comes to AI.
Current AI is almost certainly not a person … but at some point, it seems almost inevitable that it will progress to the point where it crosses the line of personhood. Where do we draw that line? How will we know if an AI has crossed it? And how do we address the rights and responsibilities of an artificial person? Is it then unethical to turn it off or delete it? Is it okay to turn it off as long as you intend to turn it back on later? Should it have a say in government, be able to vote? Can you get married to it? Does it have a right to create copies of itself the way you have a right to have children? Is it unethical to make copies of it without its consent? Can it own property? Can it own copyrights to ‘creative’ works it produces? Does allowing a corporation to own it and tell it what to do amount to slavery? Do we have an obligation to provide it with server space and electricity if it can’t provide those for itself? Can/should it be punished if it breaks laws, and how?
Deluded statement of the week!
Hey, man. I don’t make much effort to keep up with the bleeding edge of AI development, and I also don’t know exactly how to define a ‘person’. Cut me some slack.
Fair point. But I’d say regardless of how much advancement is made in (realistic nowadays) AI, it will never even be close to being a person. It can not even be remotely argued that AI is “12% of a person”. It’s a category difference. Even given our lack of understanding of the meatphysics involved, we know at least enough about the world to come up with an empiric definition of “person” and I’d say the most viable interpretations (“living organism of sufficient and demonstrable complexity characterized by homologation and similarity to the traits of the hominid self”) readily discounts AI for the foreseeable future.
No AI could ever qualify for that, no matter how advanced, because it’s not a ‘living organism’.
And you’d definitely want to be more clear about what ‘homologation’ means, because ‘similarity to the traits of the hominid self’ is very vague and it could potentially be argued that current AI already does that.
There’s also the huge question of how much complexity is ‘sufficient’…
I mean, sure, I’ll hope the definitions that are going about the metaphilosophy circles are clearer, I’m just mentioning a definition that seems to fall in line with the kinds of that we can readily use to measure personhood with our very limited arsenal and very limited sample size; in terms of species that have persons, we have been stuck at N=1 for the entirely of human history. “Baby’s first N=2” might be quite awesome if it ever happens, but unless we have deciphered the metaphysics of metaphilosophy (like, what a mind actually is, or being able to reproduce the biological processes that spawn sapience in a minimum viable example experiment), the only way we will be currently able to recognize the chance of personhood is if it is “human enough”: like-ours hands that enable tool use, like-ours language and expression that can serve as strata for a culture, like-ours means of suffering that can be palliated and can generate and teach empathy, like-ours amplitude of facial expression that allows for a reading of emotions.
With the definition given, AI is conveniently and clearly discarded, as are corporations. We already have enough issue with our legal systems treating corporations as if they were people, we certainly don’t need more.