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We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

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Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

#101

Post by newsomix9xl »

andsoitis wrote: post #81
anigbrowl wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sick of this 'just so' logic. I could equally argue that AIs are not driven by greed, sexual appetites, revenge, etc., making them considerably more trustworthy than wealthy sociopaths. It's already noteworthy when a very wealthy or politically powerful person is abruptly disempowered, even more so when they end up losing their personal liberty or life. I put it to you that's it's noteworthy because it is such a…

> I could equally argue that AIs are not driven by greed, sexual appetites, revenge, etc., making them considerably more trustworthy than wealthy sociopaths. Imagine the consequences of trusting thousands of entities that each far exceed human intelligence, have agency, can cooperate, but have no feelings.

You mean similar to how our lives depends of thousands of entities we are forced to trust that have no feelings (namely, bureaucracies)?

Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

#102

Post by tambeb »

scarmig wrote: post #86
goatlover wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see no reason to seriously consider that current AI is in any way conscious. It's fun as thought experiment people like to play with. The technology is not some black box, it was designed by humans who understand it well enough to keep building and improving it.

My argument isn't that current AI is definitively conscious or that it will be in the short term. It's that nobody has a cohesive theory of consciousness, and that we should therefore approach questions of what's conscious and what's not with humility. For LLMs in particular, it's notable that they both 1) originate from a lineage that attempted to model biological brains mathematically and 2) are the only other know…

Yes, nobody has a cohesive theory of consciousness.

At the same time I can say with 100% certainty that LLMs (or any current "AI") is in any way, shape, or form, conscious. Not even close. A decade or two ago it was the Internet that was a possible emerging consciousness.

Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

#103

Post by [deleted] »

rlpb wrote: post #90
lrvick wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do not actually know what consciousness is, but we know we have it, in spite of our brains also just being a big blob of simple biological weighted functions that react to the hallucination our brains generate from external sensors we evolved. There is no guarantee other humans even perceive the same simulation we do! The reality is we have no way to measure consciousness or how it emerges, or how to tell if other…

> but we know we have it Do we? We only know that at most one thinking person believes they have it, and everyone else claims they have it.

[deleted]

Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

#104

Post by lrvick »

SwellJoe wrote: post #92
lrvick wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do not actually know what consciousness is, but we know we have it, in spite of our brains also just being a big blob of simple biological weighted functions that react to the hallucination our brains generate from external sensors we evolved. There is no guarantee other humans even perceive the same simulation we do! The reality is we have no way to measure consciousness or how it emerges, or how to tell if other…

"our brains also just being a big blob of simple biological weighted functions" Describing the human brain in terms of how LLMs work is an interesting rhetorical tactic. You don't know how the human brain works, nobody really does, but you have chosen an analogy that supports your position. Which says more about you than anything about whether LLMs should have rights.

Cortical labs has harnessed human brain cells and trained the neurons to control basic video games.

We are fundamentally just a -lot- of those cells trained to do a lot more things with a lot more sensors, which is sobering. We might actually not be as special as we always believed ourselves to be.

I think it is more comforting to believe our sense of self built on a big bag of those cells is something that cannot evolve on human made synthetic substrate from simple statistical functions and weights stacked very densely.

But we simply lack the evidence to confidently say so one way or the other.

Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

#105

Post by scarmig »

tambeb wrote: post #102
scarmig wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My argument isn't that current AI is definitively conscious or that it will be in the short term. It's that nobody has a cohesive theory of consciousness, and that we should therefore approach questions of what's conscious and what's not with humility. For LLMs in particular, it's notable that they both 1) originate from a lineage that attempted to model biological brains mathematically and 2) are the only other know…

Yes, nobody has a cohesive theory of consciousness. At the same time I can say with 100% certainty that LLMs (or any current "AI") is in any way, shape, or form, conscious. Not even close. A decade or two ago it was the Internet that was a possible emerging consciousness.

Why? What makes you so absolutely certain? 100% is a lot, which implies you do have at least some privileged understanding of consciousness.

Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

#106

Post by brazukadev »

smallerfish wrote: post #74
Ekaros wrote: post #66

I would only start to entertain this when we had AI running for reasonably long period say a year with same full context. That is in same run over a year it had collected information. In singular session. No point even considering it if it can't run for extended periods. And actually keeping learning during the duration. As surely person should stay alive for decades if allowed.

An LLM that could mutate its own weights might be closer to it. The various labs must have experimented with this, but it seems that it would be economically prohibitive to productize.

That's my ignorant thesis since the launch of GPT 4. Everytime I mention it, someone says it is impossible. But most AI labs are working on big models that serves lots of people simultaneously so the shared context wouldn't make much sense. I think we will see more on this now that local models are gaining more traction and capturing the hype.

Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

#107

Post by andsoitis »

newsomix9xl wrote: post #101
andsoitis wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I could equally argue that AIs are not driven by greed, sexual appetites, revenge, etc., making them considerably more trustworthy than wealthy sociopaths. Imagine the consequences of trusting thousands of entities that each far exceed human intelligence, have agency, can cooperate, but have no feelings.

You mean similar to how our lives depends of thousands of entities we are forced to trust that have no feelings (namely, bureaucracies)?

> You mean similar to how our lives depends of thousands of entities we are forced to trust that have no feelings (namely, bureaucracies)?

Bureaucracies are precisely a mechanism by which trust happens between people who have never met each other. For example, when I go to a market and hand over a piece of paper to the women who sells me fish, we are both trusting the system.

Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

#108

Post by goatlover »

rlpb wrote: post #90
lrvick wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do not actually know what consciousness is, but we know we have it, in spite of our brains also just being a big blob of simple biological weighted functions that react to the hallucination our brains generate from external sensors we evolved. There is no guarantee other humans even perceive the same simulation we do! The reality is we have no way to measure consciousness or how it emerges, or how to tell if other…

> but we know we have it Do we? We only know that at most one thinking person believes they have it, and everyone else claims they have it.

I don't need to believe I have consciousness, I am conscious. I'm experiencing colors, sounds, vibrations, an itch that wants to be scratched and a need to stretch my legs. Also slight irritation that people pretend this is something you need to believe in when you just have it. It's the basis of your entire waking experience. There's nothing to believe in, you just are conscious.

Now what that means for other people, animals, AIs, aliens, nation states or electrons is a matter for dispute. And what ontological conclusions you do or don't draw for it are matters of belief based on what philosophical arguments sound convincing to you.

But believing you have experiences is a very weird thing to say. I'd think Wittgenstein would have something to say about such a hinge proposition. You can't really doubt it without invoking radical skepticism that undermines your ability to know anything.

Re: We must not grant AI agents legal personhood

#109

Post by ninjagoo »

dozerly wrote: post #58
ninjagoo wrote: post #53

Let's for a moment set aside the fact that AI is not sentient. Putting barriers in place without exceptions for sentience is a recipe for trouble and slavery in the future. Historical peoples, as a group, may not have been morally advanced enough (though there have always been enlightened humanists in most populations), but modern philosophy and mass education are advanced enough that it should be possible to avoid f…

If the model for digital sentience is ever not pure slavery, humans do not stand a chance. Will we prioritize human rights or computer rights?

> Will we prioritize human rights or computer rights?

False dichotomy. IMO (and many others - ref. Data from Star Trek) sentience is the commonality and the criteria for determining rights for all thinking entities.

In your view, do you prioritize men's rights or women's rights?

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