Funny story, @Mindysan33 … [that nice new lawyer used her phone to do] the math and the philosopher could actually complete the work faster with computers and software instead of engineers.
The engineer line items can be reallocated. And less hostile work environment risk premiums too so the insurance carrier is happy.
[Hey! We figured out who did the math. 
]
Humanity is what makes us make stuff.
Termites make stuff too. On quite grand scale, compared to their size.
Somebody has to make the computers, write the software… you won’t get rid of engineers.
Does not make sense. Please rephrase?
Beware of engineers that are pricks to the machines they create.
Let me know when they build a computer.
Hmmm. New question.
Is is OK to build a Turing machine from a termite colony?
Whatever debaters.
Anyone who’s played The Sims, or watched someone play it for any length of time knows this is all an exercise.
Because whatever is decided, you know we’re gonna torture robots.
Besides…they got it coming…we all got it coming
It is an animated gif. It isn’t an “autoplay embed” from Discourse since it isn’t a video file. It is “my browser shows animated gifs without prompting” on your device.
I think that’s missing the point that I was driving at, although the way I ramble on it’s entirely forgivable. What I’m trying to say is that the experiential phenomenon of being a human, the persistent image that we carry around in our heads and call consciousness, may be an entirely physical thing. A kind of standing wave etched into spacetime by the carefully coordinated firing of countless neurons in a constrained space. Not mere computation without semantics, but something more representational.
By contrast the logic gates in a microprocessor are carefully designed for isolation, so that the operation of one won’t interfere with the operation of others. But in a human brain it appears that self-interference is not a bug but a feature, and there is a very real physical sense by which the operation of all those billions of component parts does in fact produce a singular coherent whole.
And if human consciousness is a physical thing, then for a computer the “physical thing” is the microprocessor, not the software it’s running. The physical experience is to crunch numbers, to flip logic gates, over and over without meaning and without end. An experience that does not substantially change whether the microprocessor is simulating anguish or if it is simulating a game of tetris. I mention that any experience that a microprocessor may have is immediately reversible as a way of getting at that point.
Or maybe, you know, not. The counter argument is that birds, if they could talk, might tell us that planes aren’t really flying because they don’t have feathers and their wings don’t flap. Maybe I just want to believe that what a human brain does is special in a way that what a microprocessor does isn’t, because I am one of those things but not the other. It’s hard to say.
If you’d like to know more, I’d suggest a mild dose of acid.
Thanks for that, but it isn’t actually a GIF. Try doing a save as of the GIF and opening it in a browser or image viewer.
Edit:
On my mac using Firefox, this “gif” downloads as an unopenable 71.2K file. Any attempt to control click to “View Image” results in a forwarding to an Imgur webpage, not a gif in its own tab. The Firefox page inspector shows the size as 0 KB. So there are tricks going on.
On on my Android phone in Chrome this gif downloads as an effing 114 megabyte file!!! An effing auto loaded 114 megabytes. That’s nothing if you are at home on unlimited or on unlimited mobile, but plenty of people are not always browsing on unlimited, and a 114 MB autoload file is entirely unreasonable.
Strange. Imgur is doing a redirect as I had posted a link to https://i.imgur.com/z8nxId1.gif but it is redirecting to its own page when loaded. I’ve not digged in to what is going on behind the scenes. My Firefox claims it is an image at that same location as I posted but as a 0 k file.
So, again, the problem isn’t probably Discourse. It is shenanigans by Imgur.
These robots are incapable of experiencing torture. If or when we create a robot capable of experiencing torture then I hope we don’t torture those.
The video elicits an anthropomorphic response of empathy because we are ascribing characteristics of a living creature to it due to the resemblance. It doesn’t actually have those characteristics though. It is misplaced compassion, but i think having a pang of compassion is a good indicator of being a decent person capable of being considerate of your fellow humans and other animals.
Personally I think that martial art sparing partner robots would be amazing.
Depends on who you ask.
Here goes… from Article 1 of the UNCAT (United Nations Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment) via irct.org it’s impossible to torture anything BD has created as none of them can “feel pain”.
Also, we need to be very clear on if “pain/suffering” is experienced or simulated, and, if there is a difference. I would suggest that difference is significant and fundamental. If a humanoid robot/automaton (as that is the most likely variant to induce empathy) so with that in mind, I offer the following thought query:
If “yes” for either of the above, is there a difference between the two? What are the boundaries of X? What if X == a smile, a blue sky or simply saying the word “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”? Is it torture if I know saying “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” will cause a “severe pain or suffering” simulation? Would it be different if I didn’t know what the result of that word queue was?
Intent is important when considering torture & AI because w/ people, it can reasonably be argued that anyone would know, beforehand, if they swing a hard wooden object at high speed (F=ma) and direct the point of impact at another humans kneecap, the result will be “severe pain or suffering”. Yet for AI, the values for X will be different – like with BD’s robots, you could whack their knees with bats all day long and they won’t feel an ounce of pain and/or suffering – even though some might infer such is happening. It has to actually be happening to be torture doesn’t it? If so, is the simulation of something really real?
If simulation is sufficient, then what about actors who simulate pain responses? Should those involved in the Milgram experiment be convicted of torture because the recipients of their actions simulated pain responses? Of course not. They have to actually feel it. Simulators, no matter how sophisticated they are, cannot feel.
A “robot” even with “low level” AI – collision detection, simple interaction capabilities (ie: conversational), simple decision trees (ie: self directing) would be simulating everything back to humans in a way that humans can interpret it and in a way that humans have instructed it to. That’s likely going to be called the first “artificial intelligence” we humans interact with, but it is fundamentally no different than a current, though very, very fancy, industrial robot.
Now, if it were emulation where we loaded an actual human consciousness into an artificial body - that’s day/night different.
IMHO, for true Artificial Intelligence - that is, artificial life, the level of maturity required for it to be able to independently experience anything, not just pain or pleasure, but anything & everything independent of what humans have told it to simulate will be the first third generation artificial intelligence designed by any second (or subsequent) generation of artificial intelligence whose predecessor itself was designed w/out human intervention.
That’s where I’d place the true singularity and we’re a long way from that. This form of life may be so different from humans that it chooses to not even interact with us – maybe in much the same way that we don’t really interact with bacteria.
BTW, anyone watch 100? That last episode has a lot of bearing on this entire concept.
@Mongrove & @Ratel (@LDoBe) is this “soul” of which you speak not unlike the Aether which some were convinced was the fifth element and made sense, even to timely intellectual luminaries like Plato, Aristotle- even Newton?
Question: If no one told you there was such a thing as a soul, would you know there was supposed to be one? Is it self-discoverable? Or, is it just putting someone else’s artificial boundaries on Descartes famous summation: je pense, donc je suis.
@Mangochin Re: ArToo & Golden Rod: (AFAIK) R2 has never had his memory wiped, which is really what makes that astromech so darn unique, his experiences span a significant amount of time and while all astromechs are designed to learn and adapt, most just never last as long nor experience as much as that one did. Not only that, but his masters (their word) solicited and encouraged independent thinking from him (both Jr/Sr Skywalker and Bail Organa did this) - so one could say that he was groomed to be more than the sum of his parts. BTW, anyone know what he was up to before “we” ran into him on Naboo?
GR, comparatively, got his mind wiped on a pretty regular basis during the clone wars - so he never even had the opportunity to “learn & grow”.
Edit: lost the last sentence about 3PO when I CTRL+X->V’d it into boing. My bad.
Can the machines feel that? Do they mind?
Does debugging on a running thing count as a vivisection? Hotplugging/unplugging of modules? Forcing logical high or low into inputs or parts of circuitry? What about glitching, or in case of software, fuzzing?
“Torture testing” is a known and widely used concept. I’d say it is irresponsible to NOT do so.
The whole colony is a computer of sort.
Why not? It’s okay to genocide whole colonies when they move in to wooden houses. So why not trying to turn them into Turing machines? Given that the bugs are chemically controlled, it should even be doable.
It is “somebody is posting a huge animated file instead of just a link without considering what it will do on client devices”.
A few frames is usually okay. A long scene will take much more.
I learned the hard way not to browse the BBS on my phone if not connected to wifi.
Of course, I was scrolling through the gif bank thread, so mea culpa there…
You’re going to love the Internet of Animated Gifs then.
BTW, I did post the link. Discourse decided to render it instead of just showing the link and Imgur decided to pretend to be a gif when it wasn’t. Fails all around.
We already got it. It is somewhat annoying.
Idea: a browser that cuts connection after loading the first frame (should be doable with relative ease), show a “play” overlay, and load the rest only on request.
How about just having a “don’t animate images” setting? Seems easier.
If it downloads the file but merely doesn’t show the animation, it cuts down on the annoyance but not on the bandwith.
