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So I started to re watch a web series, Power Corrupts by darkmatter2525, as the final episode was posted a few days ago and I wanted to go from start to finish to fully enjoy the end. Its a great series and I highly recommend watching it.
At one point in the story the subject about the ethical treatment of purely digital life comes up. Not just a robot, or a computer that can think. But rather, entire civilizations of fully sentient beings living out their entire lives all in a simulation. *Spoiler Alert* (or not really as its pretty obvious in the first few minutes) these simulated civilizations are created for the shear purpose of providing a testing ground for the "moral fiber" of the flesh and blood human who acts as a god inside the simulation. As the title of the series states power corrupts and the test is to see which humans go bad and which are humble enough and have the will power to not let power go to their heads.
Coincidentally, this week I am also re reading I, Robot by Isaac Asimov. In the robot universe of Asimov, the robots operate under 3 Laws of Robotics:
First Law
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Second Law
A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Third Law
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Sadly, the big push for AI is not towards the general purpose "sentient being" type systems found in classic SciFi. Rather, we seem to have ditched this goal for better, faster and more accurate predictors of very specific events. Models for weather, buying patterns and what you really mean when you search for something. I doubt we will be creating a Lt. Data any time soon as our focus has been diverted. But what if we did? Would it matter if the driving force was specifically to create artificial life? Does it matter that the life we consider precious happened to come into existence purely from random chance?
I've always enjoyed reading papers about and watching videos of people using neural networks to solve a problem. Later analysis of the network shows just how the pathways seem to be as farm from common sense as you could get. There is a good series by 3Blue1Brown that goes over how a neural network is able to read human writing of numbers and when the pathways are broken down you'd assume that the parts we see in the shape of numbers is what the network would use to identify them. But you'd be wrong. The order in which all the trainings occurred caused the network to form in a very unique way and while all other examples of the same code would generate relatively the same results, the networks themselves would be unique. Is this uniqueness why we consider sentience precious?
So what if The Sims were sentient? Would it matter to us at all? Would it matter that they were all specifically designed to be sentient beings or would it only matter if they came into being by someone first creating a "Conway's Game of Life" that slowly evolved into sentients? In the back of my head I've kind of wanted to dabble into AI, but with the idea of creating a primordial ooze scenario to see what millions of iterations would result in. Code generating code that could grow and break into new iterations until something interesting happened.
$ published: 2022-09-25 22:00 $
$ tags: sci-fi $
-- CC-BY-4.0 jecxjo 2022-09-25