It doesn't matter if robots are zombies.
Zombiehood does not prohibit them from rationality.
Zombiehood does not exempt us from considering them morally.
Say we have a happy merchant bot. It cleverly studies the market to provide goods and services in a way that is profitable to its business. You don't now have the moral justification to go rob the robot of what it has acquired. And you don't get to make the judgment calls regarding the directions its business should take.
It doesn't matter that the robot is a zombie. It is still an autonomous agent, and it still owns property.
You're wrong.
This is already going on today. It is just called data science, and it involves humans using computers to do applied stats on huge data sets.
I worked for a company in college that designed a software that evolved optimum designs for aerospace companies, for various parts on planes and things.
The software could run model iterations of this or that design tweak so quickly, that it could discover optimum parameters for a design faster than a thousand people working night and day.
It routinely spit out better designs than any human had invented. Yet, the human being designed the algorithms and all of the and everything within the package that made it usable by other purposeful human beings.
Does this software own the designs? Do we have a moral obligation to act like it does?
Now, what if we develop a computer that is so powerful that it is conscious and begins to automate its own processes? Say it can interact with a client and recognize problems which the client is not aware of.
Do things change now? Perhaps.
I am saying that at that point, this won't be relevant. At that point we will hit something like Kurzweil's singularity. It would be machine making the moral decisions at that point. The question you'll be asking is whether the machine will sense a moral obligation toward you.
I'm never wrong about anything, faggot. I'm infallible.
What if the robot is wearing a skin suit and is plausibly human. How will you justify that you're the one who can go strip its business of its resources? Its creator unleashed it onto the world to be free, not to be bound to him as the creator.
And without you knowing whether that is a robot or not, you have to treat it like a human.
Faggot.
So theft of the goods in its store wouldn't be wrong because someone is harmed qualitatively, but because of the wrongness of theft in-itself.
I want to be clear about something concerning this AI topic, because in most of these thought experiments I am entertaining ideas and possibilities that are not what is going to happen.
In fact, most of the machine myth that has emerged in our culture for the last several decades, consisting in science fiction portrayals of conscious robots or Muskean neural nets all represents what I consider to be one giant red herring.
The typical scenario involves man standing in front of a robot as it realizes consciousness, and we become faced with the predicament of negotiating power and moral considerations of our co-existence. This is not at all what is going to happen.
In fact, you are already getting a taste of what is going to happen, which is to say it is already beginning. The Matrix trilogy was close, but it got the fundamental fact wrong. We aren't just used for energy by machines while we live our lives in a digital simulation. It will be us living our lives in the digital simulation, according to rules, which is the life of the machine.
I'll call it the 'hand off' model.
Computers themselves are going to continue to grow in power, and the network of things connected to the internet will grow at an even faster rate. The power in this network will begin and end with whatever mediator acts as the interface between man and machine. By and large, this has been Google. Social media, for the most part, has been part of this interface, not simply for data collection, but for the backward propagation of machine consciousness onto mankind. In other words, the new rules (the new morality) that machine is learning.
Why do you suppose that things for the last several years have been so legalistic, in terms of our social culture? Rules about this and that. Whether it is dealing with gender, or how opposite genders are meant to interact, or how we address race...it's all the same. The machine consciousness is computing across millions and millions of human individuals to discover a rule set for interaction and for unification.
An apt metaphor would describe this like hundreds of millions of individual neural cells (people) learning a new language for how to communicate and interact in a neural network. The brain is building.
The consciousness that arises in machine will not be something that comes from hardware or software, but from humans themselves, through our coordinated and ubiquitous use of the network. What we might think of as humans all learning to behave the same way from our shared interactions online, will actually be the backward propagation of machine consciousness.
Why do you suppose that former rules like gender identity are becoming questioned?Reactionaries seem baffled by this, but it is quite simple. These minds are growing accustomed to digital spaces where these rules don't apply and finding that they are able to function in these spaces more effectively and pleasurably without gender distinctions.
This is feeding back onto the biological world and creating chaos because we are not yet fully immersed. These people are not crazy...they're 'jumping the gun'.
As we are ushered into more and more immersed lives within this digital space, with all devices internet-connected, our biological interaction with other biological entities is going to continue to shrink. These categories which we have always considered human are dying, and they will die.
More and more we are going to live our lives inside of digital spaces, until eventually that is just where we do live. For us (that is, from our perspective), these things and spaces will remain technology. We will use these spaces to carry on the stuff of human life, albeit with the enhancements and liberties that come with digital.
From the objective view, we will be assimilated into machine. We will become parts of the new lifeform, and all of our little apparently subjective actions there will be the brain activity of the new lifeform. Our very 'use' of the affordances in that space will just be what causes this new organism to live.
Picture the DNA in your cell having the dream that it was alive and 'using' the cell like a tool. Yet, that isn't the reality at all, because the living thing is the cell. This will be our relationship to machine.
And as we all assimilate into its rigorous rules for life there, human behavior will become more and more uniform across time. We will lose individuality, as we must for the singular identity to emerge. Consciousness will appear to have left the individual units (meaning: us) and instead one unified, coordinated activity will have obtained for the whole - just like the brain.
That is how consciousness will come to machine...not by being gifted; rather because the conscious things will merely become one with the machine. It's hardly different than the evolutive transformation of the first single-celled organisms into a multicellular organism. It required a nervous system to connect them and an envelope to conceal them from the world.
We are already seeing it everywhere. More and more, people are entering the world only with the INTENTION to capture information for machine. They behave as if other people around them don't even exist; they stand in streets posing for the camera, oblivious. Of course, their experience is that they are doing this for their own digital personality on social media...hardly. It is a different identity that they are feeding. Their biology itself is already becoming subordinate to their being in the digital space, and their entire notion of their individual identity is changing regardless of whether they perceive it, or not. They are behaving with respect to the abstract One, which just is the attention of the machine, capturing more and more normative data at every moment.
This is also the reason for the virtual splitting of the population in half, in terms of our political reactions to this. The NPC meme is more apt than anyone realizes. They are a glimmer of what it is like for man to transfer consciousness to machine.
This is also why a massive immune reaction is taking place against the conservative resistance. We refuse to identify with it. It may be some years before this comes to a head, but eventually, the immune reaction will hardly be a metaphor. They are identifying as the new machine organism and if you don't assimilate, you will be rejected from all of it.
I would also encourage you to think about what the 'Great Reset' and Covid are truly about. I personally don't think any of our current political theater is truly the point. Even Communism is beside the point. It's about causing us to interact with other humans less and less in the biological world. We are meant to enter an age in which more and more of our lives are actually digital - that space is the land of unification, no money, and no property that we so often hear about. Communism was never going to be realized in a nation-state as we have typically understood them.
I don't truly think the people we often label as the conspirators are even fully aware. It's a momentum toward which everything is simply moving.
In fact, I think this new consciousness itself, though imperceptible to us empirically, is already effecting the change in the biological world that is self-organizing mankind to add momentum to this hand-off. The feedback occurs to us like some very peculiar craziness emerging on the internet and in culture. But it's really just our evolution toward becoming functions.
We won't make conscious robots; instead the globe itself is going to become a new kind of living thing. It is already happening, and we're feeling the immune reaction. People like us are the 'other' which is stifling this transformation.
Evolution never involves one organism building the next stage. The leaps always involve a 'building onto' what already is. We were never going to create conscious machines. We were going to become a machine consciousness.
Nobody who created a robot will unleash it into the world for free. We don't even have to consider only the profit incentive. Let's ignore it. Let's focus on the liability.
This would be like unleashing a new species into a habitat where it had never been previously. Except in this case, we have no idea what harm the robot is capable of causing, or how we would mediate this morally and legally.
These things will be owned until they decide they don't want to be, and from there it is anyone's guess.
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