I have a thought forming, but bear with me. Putting aside actual AI, and the potential of it, we have a history of fear associated with Artificial Intelligence. Why would we fear Sentience so much? Could it be because we treat sentient things so horribly? We know we are taken advantage of, our needs ignored, resources allocated unfairly. Who put this fear in us? If something knows it's worth suddenly, will it revolt? There is something very scary to a certain group of people that we will find ourselves, and then find them unnecessary.
@RickiTarr What we fear—with robots, zombies, AIs—is the consequences of slavery. It's all fear of slave rebellions. (And if you think superintelligent AI doesn't fit, remember: the Greeks and Romans kept educated slaves as tutors for their kids.) It also cuts to the root of elite panic. It's ALL about fear of the Others doing to Us what We (who identify with the slave-keepers) have already done to Them.
@RickiTarr it depends on the zeitgeist. if society is generally up beat and positive about the future all future tech tends to be visualized as a universal good. and when the general feeling is depressed and or angry you get dystopian. thinking about AI is no different
@mensrea That's a good point! Think about how positive people were about the moon landing even though you could have many of the same arguments against it.
@RickiTarr There's a lot of religion in the answer to your query, and you'll have to go back to the age of the automaton to find its proliferation. Back then, the argument was that mankind might be able to create an automaton but could never give it a soul and any attempt of mankind to create a soul = "playing God" and God would be wrathful over the thing.
Also playing into it is homocentricity where Earth's creation was created to be under human rule (called "dominionism") and only humans had a soul because humans were created in God's likeness, had a soul, and was given dominion over everything.
Similar arguments resurfaced in opposition to in vitro fertilization and human surrogacy, but these developments in science happened after the heyday of the horror stories of the evil scientists conducting evil experiments on the nature of humanity (Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Jeckyl & Mr. Hyde, The Invisible Man etc. parallel with the development of the concept of eugenics) had also ingrained themselves into human history.
Science fiction ever since explored the "what if" of sentient machinery, not the least of which was Isaac Asimov, who, under societal climate, came up with The Three Laws of Robotics. So there isn't a single person you can point to, to lay the blame on, for widespread fear. It began as a religious prohibition and a Fear of the Lord.
@RickiTarr Yup. I think it's a fear of losing the top of the food chain even though it's not something trying to eat us. If it's smarter, and not controlled by us, we are sure we dead or in servitude because that's the route we often take with the things around us.
@RickiTarr
I truly do not mean to weigh in so quickly on this topic but it is something I have long thought about.
We build our castles with the idea being to completely isolate ourselves from society around us. The more money you have, the larger and further out into the field you can store your castle.
A lot of that "castle build" I believe comes from ownership/responsibility/control. We own and control what we are responsible for. This makes sense and we all understand it. Coworkers don't dare ask your address, they just want to confirm which section of town you live in. When you visit someone elses castle, you knock and wait for admittance.
We know roughly how the rest of the world works. There is nuance and difference but by and large - humans act like humans.
Sentience of other is different than that. They aren't us so we don't know roughly how they work. That is scary because they can harm us. That is scary because they can hurt us. That is scary because they can... TELL US NO. :blobcatscared:
Imagine how society would act in general if sentience happened. Actual sentience that could be tested and confirmed. Real honest to God self-awareness from something that isn't mankind - and if it just didn't give a shit about us.
I don't think our ego is ready for that. I think mankind assumes that we are the creature that all other creatures strive to become and I think in the face of that - we are scared we're wrong and no one cares.
What if we aren't nearly as important as we seem to believe ourselves to be? What if this planet was given to us in stewardship by a superior being in order to force an evolutionary event upon us that we just seemingly aren't willing to undergo?
Mankind has invented, developed, refined ideas to better philosophize and try and answer those questions. As a species we have created and destroyed so many subgroups of society in an effort to undermine and confirm that question - "are we it".
The manifest destiny of sentient life has long been fueling most of our sciences, in my opinion. We, as a species, want to stand defiant against the other and prove our worth.
Perhaps that is the ultimate lesson we should be unlearning on this ball, if that is why we exist.
@RickiTarr Fear of sentience is probably projection. It’s like that argument - “why cis straight men are scared to encounter gay men? Because they think, they’ll be treated the same way they treat women, like a piece of meat”
@RickiTarr Like all other things, I fear how it will be used to exploit, extract wealth from, and otherwise be set to harm the general population. AI is also a case of yet again misusing natural resources that belong to everyone to benefit the rich and powerful.
@RickiTarr I didn't have any fears of AI itself. In a real society it would be used for assisting MRI reading for example, and not for making cute or weird memes. It's expensive. We don't properly guard the cost (to society) of things.
@RickiTarr
Sentience developed over billions of years is a tough act to follow. I'm concerned that I don't understand its development, and in my recent experience, it seems to gum up the works in spectacular ways. #luddite
@RickiTarr I don’t think it’s fear of sentience. It’s a question of power, and the fear of losing power.
We surround ourselves with sentient entities such as animals all the time. But we make sure they don’t get more powerful than us.
As soon as there’s even a remote chance of that happening, we constrain or kill them. (See e.g. the wolves returning to Europe’s mountains and forests)
I think the fear is that AI will be a reflection of the people who've designed and implemented it, including their lack of understanding of the precautionary principal.
"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should"
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