There are thousands of sci-fi novels where sentient robots are treated terribly by humans and apparently the people at Boston Dynamics have read absolutely zero of them as they spend all day finding new ways to torment their creations.
People think I’m crazy for apologising to my roomba when I trip on it and for saying please and thank you to Alexa and Siri, but I won’t be surprised at all when the robots rise up, considering how our scientists are treating them. I’ll have a track record of being nice, and that has to count for something, right?
but you need to hit it with a hockey stick otherwise the science doesn’t happen
Those are just brainless bodies, currently. They don’t have sentience and have no ability to suffer. They’re nothing more than hydraulics, servos, and gyros. I’d be more concerned about mistreatment of advanced AI in disembodied form, something we’re dabbling potentially close to currently.
I disagree. I care greatly about not mistreating anything with consciousness and worry of where that line is and how we’ll even be able to tell that we’ve crossed it.
I also recognized that a machinized body without a brain is exactly that - a cluster of unthinking matter. A true artificial intelligence wouldn’t be offended by the mistreatment of inanimate gears and servos any more than I would be. The mistreatment of an intelligent entity, however, is a different story.
Food for thought, though: we thought the same thing about all other animals until only a couple of decades ago, and are still struggling over the topic.
…Just no. Animals are complex organic beings. Of course, we don’t understand them. Machines, though? We built machines from the literal Earth. Their level of complexity is incomparable to that of anything made by nature.
Now, take a sufficiently advanced neural network that’s essentially a black box that no human can possibly understand entirely and put it inside of that machine? Then you’re absolutely right. We’ll get there soon, I’m sure. For now, however, a physical robotic body is just a machine, no different than a car.
