But aren’t you merely assuming this to be the case of the Westworld setting? Part of what I enjoy about the unfolding of the first season is that I assume that the setting is contrary to what you are outlining here - that there are robots running the park, and other emergent and distributed AI in the greater world at large.
That said, IIRC it has never been stated on Westworld that it takes place in a future. BSG, for instance, was about sentient AI in the past. Unfortunately, televised and cinematic fiction lag far behind literature in what they are willing to extrapolate.
Yeah. I am a bit. I just didn’t find enough fresh ideas about this issue in there to justify accepting the premise of this theme park, so I spent a lot of the series rolling my eyes, but I do that a lot to be honest.
I’m also bundling “Humans” in with this a bit, unlike Westworld I couldn’t get through more than a few episodes of that. The juxtaposition of functional humanoid robots and a microwave oven like the one in my kitchen was just too dumb for me.
I think the last thing I enjoyed that handled the emergence of self aware AI was “Her”, that was a more thoughtful examination, and I liked ex machina, the premise is still kind of dumb but I thought it had some new ideas and worked well dramatically.
Westworld just moved a little slowly for me, but it was tied up nicely at the end.
No argument with that. I’m still partial to the standard Locke/Enlightenment answer (and basis for US constitutional law/ bill of rights) - no one grants rights. Every living thing has all rights simply by virtue of existing, we willingly cede certain rights to governments to have them enforce other rights on our behalf, and in turn forbid those governments from infringing still other rights in turn. But I don’t expect to convince anyone, and I myself am open to other suggestions and approaches.
I think this is another one of those cases where the real state of debate has moved on, and most of us just haven’t caught up. No, we don’t have anything like an explicit definition of words like “rights,” “good,” “person,” “mind,” “deserve,” or “human.” But read enough moral and political philosophy, meta-ethics, sci-fi, etc., and this stops seeming like an interesting question. Focusing on AI is too narrow and also hard for most people to approach and think clearly about.
If scientists could clone a Neanderthal, would it be a legal person? If not, what if they crossed it with a human? What if it wasn’t a 50/50 cross, where would the line be? If so, what about Homo erectus, etc.? And when we learn to genetically engineer ourselves or our children, maybe even to the point of building our genomes, eggs, and sperm in a lab (and gestating them in equipment) instead of taking them from a human, how much can you change and remain human?
And if your ethics relies on a concept of a soul, what exact criteria do you use to determine ensoulment? After all, you should be able to either declare now whether a hypothetical being would have a soul, or be able to say what tests would determine the answer in practice, or acknowledge that your belief is inadequate to accomplish its purpose.
The only natural category I’m aware of that seems to survive examination of this kind is what Clarke put in the 2001 sequels: ““And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere.”
Need more likes to give you, especially for the last paragraph.
I’m a bit less concerned about the middle paragraph, actually. One, it’s like buying a really horrible lottery ticket where you have a probability of waking into a horrible existence, and some probability of a wealthy one, and if someone understands that I can imagine a sufficiently sane human being competent to make that choice and a typical human government attempting to prevent humans from doing so under false pretenses. Two, at least we have some legal precedent for “you can’t sell yourself into slavery” although we’d be hard pressed to find a judge that would understand the information theoretic and physical reasons that get tied up with the legal/moral concept of continuity of personhood in this situation, since even professional philosophers have a hard time with it.
Easy to say, not so easy to enforce. Does something have a right if no one recognizes it does and the thing can’t force anyone to recognize its rights?
Yes, yes, I know this has been covered historically but, no, we don’t have intrinsic rights because there is no God and nothing “grants” us rights. We have conventions in which we pretend that human beings have inherent rights because we choose to live in a world where that being true is better than the alternative. The question is then whether we extend this fiction to cover other entities. We have been doing so for some animals for quite some time and there are current debates about whether great apes have human rights, for example.
Definitely. I guess it makes sense though. One, until very recently education in the humanities was the standard preparation for the elite. Two, the same people that have the leisure to learn and study would also have been the rulers.
@enso IIRC the original justification starts from man-in-the-state-of-nature, law-of-the-jungle “rights” and “freedoms” where, because there is no society, nothing is forbidden, nothing is protected. So “yes” to your question, but not an empty, not a happy “yes.” Since in practice that is a terrible way to live, we humans try to build societies and institutions that work better. The primary work of those institutions is to better navigate the cases where the rights and freedoms of different individuals collide.
Obviously we still have a long way to go, and yes its really hard.
Also for the record, I don’t think that a conscious AI automatically deserves all the same rights as a human. Show me a sentient paperclip maximizer with hopes and dreams, and I will happily destroy/murder it. Someone builds a sentient weapons system and tells it to obey orders without question, same thing. My willingness to recognize another mind’s rights depends on its ability and willingness to do the same.
“We hold these truths as self-evident…” is signed off by slave owners, so some of the founding thought on rights didn’t even extend them to the majority of humans (since women didn’t make the cut).
Despite that, I disagree the inherentness of rights is a fiction. It’s human-created, but I think it’s real. Like if we build a bridge, the fact that I can walk over the bridge becomes independent of the bridge’s builders. I think it’s factual that we have rights by virtue of being human, but that if we don’t do maintenance on the infrastructure that makes rights inherent then they can cease to exist. The fiction we tend to engage in surrounding rights is that anything could possibly be permanent.
I don’t think whether great apes deserve human rights is a decision for us to make, I think it is a matter of fact for us to determine. Humans created rights, but that doesn’t mean they are arbitrary.
I get your bridge reference but I think that these rights aren’t “real” in the way that people traditionally conceived as these rights as inherent. There is a lot of hidden “God” talk behind the idea of rights, traditionally (“endowed by their creator” etc) even by supposed atheists.
I believe humans create meaning and many things in the universe but, reality, as such, is pretty much indifferent to our efforts. We create the world we want to live in and all. I don’t think you and I are really in disagreement here though. Because humanity creates rights and institutions to protect them, as well as any ethics or morality it is on us to make sure these things happen and create a world worth living within.
Yeah, but I don’t put that much stock in the way things were traditionally conceived of. I always think of ancient philosophers who argued heat wasn’t real because if you put your hand in cold water and move it to room temperature water than the room temperature water feels warm. See, it’s all in our heads, it’s all just perspective!
So the fact that some people had grasped at a hazy concept that eventually became rights and had something to do with God or natural law or something doesn’t make rights today unreal, it just potentially makes most people wrong about what they are. We struggled with what heat was for a long time, but the whole time we were talking about something that really existed in the world, we just couldn’t get it right.
I try to see everything through a lens where goodness or rightness or ethics or something like that is a real thing that we are grasping at in the same way. We don’t know what it is, but one day we’ll figure it out and then be able to build meters to measure it (and the old people who grew up with the magic-based definition of goodness will have fits). It’s not that I’m married to the idea that this is true, it’s more like I want to see if I can find something that really shows it can’t be the case.
I agree that it’s on us to uphold these things, but I push back against the idea (even though I agree with it) because it often imports the idea that rights are ephemeral or could simply disappear. I use an analogy to a bridge because we all know bridges are real. But a bridge is a hell of a lot easier to destroy than human rights. It’s not that humans rights can’t go away, it’s just that it would take a lot more than one well placed explosive to get the job done.
