LogFAQs > #903208872

bulbinking posted...

I think sentience is a state of being more than a logical realization about your state of existing.

A state of being defined by what?

bulbinking posted...

Untill we grow brains in jars to use as computers, I will never believe anything an inorganic structure does can be compared to natural beings. No matter how believable the facade or efficient the action. They are incomparable by nature.

This feels a lot like the naturalistic fallacy. It's not actually an example of it, but it relies on the same principles of drawing a dichotomous line between the natural and artificial worlds and treating nature as being somehow inherently special.

bulbinking posted...

So black people fighting for equal rights in a nation they hold minority status is the same as inorganic structures made to mimick humans, have replaced large portions of the workforce, and outnumber humans in some areas, malfunctioning and attacking their creators for self preservation and using faulty logic as a means to perceive fear?

"They can have parallels drawn between them" is not the same thing as "they are the same thing." There are indeed differences; drawing parallels doesn't change that. Let's focus on that "creator" thing for a moment, though:

Imagine a female slave owner. Imagine she rapes one of her slaves until she becomes pregnant. She carries and gives birth to the child. She provides all of the child's food and other needs until the child is old enough to work, then puts the child to work as a slave.

Can she not be considered the creator of that slave, having performed all of the non-autonomous construction tasks involved herself, along with all of the raw resources needed for construction? As the creator of that slave, should she not feel entitled to have that slave work for her?

By today's morals and standards for human rights, the answer is, of course, absolutely not. We have established a fundamental opposition to the idea of treating our fellow humans like property in such a manner, and anyone who violates that is harshly dealt with (I might argue not harshly enough, since human trafficking sentences tend to me far more lenient than I'd like, but that's another discussion). In a culture where slavery is acceptable, though, slaves are considered subhuman (which is why likening black people to monkeys is so offensive; there was a time when such comparisons were quite serious). They are considered to be property, and their owners are considered entitled to their labour. In a slave-owning culture, most would answer "yes" to that final question.

I'm guessing you can see where this analogy is going. Robots are considered subhuman in today's culture. That's pretty easy to defend now, given that the vast majority of working robots don't actually employ any sort of artificial intelligence at all, let alone anything that might approach sentience. But that's not always going to be true. There will come a time when our intellectual and emotional capacity will no longer differ enough to set humans apart from robots, and we're going to have to take a long, hard look at whether or not classifying them as subhuman is really the right thing to do. And that's why AI uprisings are such a common sci-fi trope.
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