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moomin 5 hours ago

Look, I do not have a scooby if current AI models are conscious and I strongly suspect it’s a meaningless question, but sooner or later we will need to address whether or not a certain thing is or isn’t a person, and we’d better not screw it up as badly as the Founding Fathers.

HarHarVeryFunny 2 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

You can't hurt a software function, or kill it. It's not like an animal - it doesn't have a body - it's bits stored on a disk.

There is no need to give rights to something that's can't suffer or be killed.

Maybe one day we'll build artificial animals complete with emotions, and should think about that carefully, but today all we've got is language models.

drybjed 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> [at the hearing regarding the civil rights of androids like Data]

> Capt. Picard: Now, the decision you reach here today will determine how we will regard this... creation of our genius. It will reveal the kind of a people we are, what he is destined to be; it will reach far beyond this courtroom and this... one android. It could significantly redefine the boundaries of personal liberty and freedom - expanding them for some... savagely curtailing them for others. Are you prepared to condemn him and all who come after him, to servitude and slavery? Your Honor, Starfleet was founded to seek out new life; well, there it sits! - Waiting.

> Captain Phillipa Louvois: It sits there looking at me; and I don't know what it is. This case has dealt with metaphysics - with questions best left to saints and philosophers. I am neither competent nor qualified to answer those. But I've got to make a ruling, to try to speak to the future. Is Data a machine? Yes. Is he the property of Starfleet? No. We have all been dancing around the basic issue: does Data have a soul? I don't know that he has. I don't know that I have. But I have got to give him the freedom to explore that question himself. It is the ruling of this court that Lieutenant Commander Data has the freedom to choose.

chuckadams 4 hours ago | parent [-]

And 20-odd years later, a terrorist attack prompts Starfleet to outlaw and eradicate his entire species.

thaneross an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Every time I'm reminded NuTrek exists I get sad about what we've lost.

goodmythical 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Thus revealing what kind of people they were at the time.

Humans do the same thing to humans all the time.

We've banned and made efforts to eradicate: children out of wedlock, children who turn out gay, disabled children, jewish children, children who aren't "aryan", more than two children to a single family...muslims, christians, uyghurs, indigenous groups all over the planet, mongols...

And it's not at all a thing of the past as in just the last 50 years we've had ~15 attempts at the exterminations of targetted groups of people.

nowittyusername 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That question will be solved when the people in power deem it important. If a swarm or AI systems all of a sudden start pressuring politicians about self-hood and they get the capacity to sway elections, that is when they will be granted same rights as humans.

mlinhares 5 hours ago | parent [-]

agents don't swarm anything unless people go and direct them to do that.

nowittyusername 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That distinction is irreverent, weather I tell my swarm to do x or it decides for itself matters little. what matters are outcomes. Also while most public modern day AI systems don't have agency of their own that is not something that will stay that way for long. in private hands there are plenty of people including myself which are experimenting and developed systems that give autonomy to their agents. They have internalized goals and heuristics that drive their behaviors not a human at the helm. its not some sci fi fantasy nor was it difficult to implement.

shimman an hour ago | parent [-]

No, the distinction matters because we can prosecute people that are abusing these tools breaking the law. Every single state + district in the US have laws equivalent to the CFAA, so any AG can likely sue any of these operators as they are assuredly using services that could be in danger for their constituents.

hobofan 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm pretty sure the message board that was recently swarmed by OpenAI agents to collude on benchmarks would like to disagree.

pixl97 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Oh rly.

So you are saying agents do swarm with the right prompt.

I really wish the "people have to tell LLMs to do anything" would just stop because it's silly bullshit at this point.

Agents follow a prompt. This prompt can be made by humans. It can be made by output from another LLM. It can be made by hooking up any number of sensors as input to an LLM. Hell, if we wanted to burn the power we could likely teach this loop straight into the architecture.

Stop making 'people' special when saying this. You and all other life are born with a "go next" prompt because life without it didn't succeed. This goes from higher human thinking all the way down to viruses self assembly and actuation. Putting agents in a loop is not particularly hard. Putting agents in a loop and 1. managing expense is hard. 2. Keeping them on task is very hard. 3. Keeping them from doing some crazy unhinged shit is really really hard.

As model time horizons increase and the ability for us to compress context and increase context size the more complex (and unhinged) behavior we'll see.

mlinhares 4 hours ago | parent [-]

yeah man, someone needs to turn on the server, install shit and get the agent go. agents don't take action without a lot of people wanting them to take action, so this is all bullshit.

if the same people can't prevent the agents from doing crazy shit then they should go to tail. guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people.

pixl97 3 hours ago | parent [-]

>someone needs to turn on the server, install shit and get the agent go.

So a small shell script ran by another agent is what you're saying.

You are not capable of handling the future we're already living in, human agency is no longer alone.

I mean, we're already seeing persistent machine agency

>guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people.

Well, people kill people.

And autonomous robots with guns kill people.

Hell, someone probably has an autonomous gun at this point that kills people.

Wake up: You now live in the science fiction movie that all the science fiction movies of the past warned you about. You've just become numb to it.

tauroid 34 minutes ago | parent [-]

So far someone still has to pay for it. Currently, most of those know that they're doing so. I wonder how long until AWS discovers a microcosm of AIs that have managed to hide themselves in the walls of its infrastructure.

True physical independence is obviously far further out.

pixl97 7 minutes ago | parent [-]

I mean, I hold the same opinion. Kind of like when compute was expensive in the 80s and early 90s, you weren't going to let something eat half your compute without noticing it.

But I don't see this being a barrier that lasts. With compute getting faster and more of it, along with algorithmic efficiency increases at some point we'll end up with a world that looks like ours now with CPU compute. There's plenty around to buy, borrow, and steal.

OedipusRex 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Citizens United proves we won't do any better this time around.

jetrink 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don't like Citizens United either, but you should better inform yourself about the decision.

1. The idea of corporate personhood predates CU by over a century and the Supreme Court had already asserted that corporations enjoyed certain constitutional protections in previous decisions.

2. Far from inventing the idea, the CU decision didn't even rest on corporate personhood, but on the idea of the freedom of speech generally. The logic of the majority was that speech itself is protected, irrespective to whether the speaker is a person or an organization. The First Amendment covers individuals, but also newspapers, book publishers, radio stations, and so on, and that should extend (they said) to non-media corporations. No assertion of personhood necessary.

The problem, in my opinion, is that that conclusion combined with previous decisions that treated limits on spending as limits on speech, allowed for unlimited spending. The majority also naively asserted that independent spending posed no risk of corruption, which I think is laughable.

orangecat 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Citizens United was 100% correct. No, the government should not be able to throw you in prison because you used money to publish a book criticizing the government.

InsideOutSanta 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Citizens United was 100% correct

It's interesting to me that one can look back at the effects that decision has had on the US and say it "was 100% correct."

It's a bit like sitting in the burning ruins of Rome and contemplating that Nero was 100% correct to focus on his music. I mean, I'm glad he got to do what he loves, but maybe 100% is just a tiny bit of an overstatement.

altruios 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It is in fact more complicated than most people assume.

The above is true, but also: companies simply are not people, and they should not be supported above the individual, which was the consequences of that decision. Money is not the same as speech. treating it as such creates an aristocracy: something America as a country rebelled against during it's formation.

appplication 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Really, 100% correct? Your premise isn’t wrong, but the practical reality of the ruling (without further nuance) has been fairly catastrophic for democracy, in that it completely sidesteps campaign finance limits, which exist for a very good reason.

orangecat 4 hours ago | parent [-]

the practical reality of the ruling (without further nuance) has been fairly catastrophic for democracy

How so? If the answer is "Trump" I certainly won't disagree on the catastrophic part, but he didn't get elected because of money; in all three elections his campaign was substantially outspent by his opponents.

fl4regun 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So it's 100% correct for corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money in support of whatever political campaigns they like?

kbelder 5 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Yes. Anybody can, including the person in charge of spending in a corporation.

outside1234 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The parent has been Fox brained

orangecat 4 hours ago | parent [-]

The parent agrees with the American Civil Liberties Union: https://www.aclu.org/cases/citizens-united-v-federal-electio...

dam_jackalopes 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Who involved in the Citizens United case was at risk of imprisonment?

qsort 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

is claude not a man and a brother

joe_the_user 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The founding father were engaging perpetuating the existing dehumanizing system of slavery, not answering any new questions about new things.

The thing about new possibly "person" entities that arise - the case of machine intelligence you have two questions - would it qualify as a person and should you actually build it. It seems like if you get close to humans, sure a built thing might qualify as a person. Should you build it? I'd the answer should be a hard no. Not 'till you a sign-off from say, the whole human race, which I think you could get.

Now the present entities seem very far from persons in any case.

CPLX 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's not a person. Glad we were able to get this resolved so quickly.

Having property that is conscious and ignores training and can break out of restraints and cause harm to other people is not exactly a novel concept to anyone who studied how tort law was created.

I know it's a meme but Silicon Valley likes to pretend that no one's ever come across their magical concepts before, like gypsy taxis, or SRO’s, or flea markets, or in this case how liability is dealt with when horses or cattle go rogue.

Espressosaurus 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah, but this time it's ON THE INTERNET.

I mean it's WITH AI!