If a robot is conscious, is it OK to turn it off?
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If a robot is conscious, is it OK to turn it off?
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Re: If a robot is conscious, is it OK to turn it off?
#2If you can turn it back on again and it is capable of resuming its previous state, why not?
Re: If a robot is conscious, is it OK to turn it off?
#3If you can turn it back on again and it is capable of resuming its previous state, why not?
Is it okay to knock someone unconscious and then wake them up again?
Re: If a robot is conscious, is it OK to turn it off?
#4Re: If a robot is conscious, is it OK to turn it off?
#5If it is conscious, can't it answer this question for itself?
Re: If a robot is conscious, is it OK to turn it off?
#6What if it’s a trillion robots?
What happens if they want to vote? Human vote wouldn’t even be a rounding error.
Re: If a robot is conscious, is it OK to turn it off?
#72 deep 4 me.
BTW. The "soul" issue precedes this problem. According to experts, one- or two-cell organisms have already a soul and jerking off is thus a crime.
So metering machine consciousness is in vain, as every transistor is already sacred.
However there will probably be great philosophical divide here, as reformists will proclaim that only powered two-transistor flipflops demonstrate life and have soul.
Re: If a robot is conscious, is it OK to turn it off?
#8Cmdr. Riker clearly thought so, because he literally did it. He did not like doing it, but it’s not clear to me if that’s out of a sense of respect for his friend, or because he thinks it hurts Data’s case: “And, now, a man will turn it off.”
But, when he stops to smell the (literal) roses, does he enjoy it? In Time’s Arrow (Part 1), he mentions that he misses people when they are gone. His “neural pathways have grown accustomed to [their] sensory input,” and he misses the experience of seeing them.
I would argue that if he can miss people, he should be able to, at least, appreciate the sensory inputs from smelling the roses.
Re: If a robot is conscious, is it OK to turn it off?
#9The question supposes that robot consciousness is satisfactorily defined, which is the real source of ambiguity. That is, the answer to the question of how to treat robot consciousness is rooted in how we determine the robot is conscious in the first place. (Such as, is it necessarily volatile? Temporal? Physically limited in space?)