I was trying to think of something that evoked the term ‘forklift upgrade’(the informal term for an IT upgrade conducted by ripping out the existing hardware and replacing it with new stuff, wholesale) but was also recognizably drawn from the equipment used in slaughterhouses for efficient deconstruction of mammals into their useful components.
Not entirely sure that I’m satisfied with this attempt; but thankfully IT operations and abattoir practice don’t overlap too broadly; at least not yet. Come 2056…
It’s interesting that almost no one thinks to ask if it is cruel to abuse robots.
When a kid tortures animals everyone assumes they’ll grow up to be a psychopath, because they should have empathy for the animal’s feelings. But when it comes to, say, furbies, we declare that it’s fine to torture them because the empathy you feel for a furbie isn’t “real”.
Well, we know the only difference between a furbie and a cube of plastic is that someone has deliberately engineered the furbie to elicit empathy. But strictly speaking, we don’t know what any other entity is feeling; there’s no objective proof that a dog can suffer and a furbie can’t. That might sound silly, but there have been (and are) plenty of cultures that found it silly to attribute sentience to cows, or dogs, or particular groups of people. And in every single one of those cases, the reaction of the rest of humanity was (is): why didn’t they just use empathy to guide their actions?
I don’t really believe Boston Dynamics robots are capable of suffering. But then, perhaps I don’t believe Greek people are capable of suffering; let’s not base our ethics on my dumb beliefs. Also: even if there is such a thing as “victimless cruelty”, is that something we need? Are lots of people saying “yeah, my husband is viciously cruel, but he targets victims who are only faking their suffering, so I think it’s super healthy”?
We’ve all got empathy circuits in our heads and they can be over- or under-calibrated. I’m sure you could set the robot fights to some kind of music to make people feel sad for the robots.
But I think for most people who like robot fights it’s more like the desire to bang two pot lids together to make a loud noise than the desire to watch animals fight. If humans are on the controls, I don’t even start to worry that the robots might be able to experience suffering. But if we start making AIs to do robot fights, I think we really ought to at least consider it.
So they remove videos that show “animal suffering”? Then why do they still allow videos that show animals being eaten alive by other animals? YouTube is stuffed with videos of herons eating gophers and pirhanas biting goldfish in half and crud like that. Why are those allowed to remain?
In a related question, why isn’t PETA screaming about those videos? Answer: because PETA is a bunch of liars and hypocrites. They don’t give a rat’s rump about animals suffering. They only care about animals suffering if the suffering is caused by humans, because their real focus is hating their own species.
Yes, that’s probably true about robot fights. And I think we are a long way from having to seriously worry about machines suffering.
The point I was really making was, if I “torture” a Sylvanian Families doll, or a cake with a koala face or whatever, what I’m doing is still cruel, even though there is (probably) no harm done. I should have the right to do it, because it is my right to have an ugly personality; but it is ugly.
Just so you know, Skynet* actually went live in 1982, it’s just biding it’s time, lulling all you meatbags into a false sense of security.
*There’s actually a Skynet Drive in a town a few miles from me, where their headquarters are based.
