RIP Tim the pencil, you will be remembered forever
Someone else said that in most science fiction, the heartless humans treat the robots shabbily because the humans think of them as machines. In real life, people say ‘thank you’ to Siri all the time.
On the other hand slavery of actual humans is a thing. And at least the first generation of strong AI will effectively be persons whom it is legal to own because our laws are human-centric.
Maybe they’ll be able to gain legal personhood through legal challenges, but, looking at the history of human rights, some degree of violence seems likely even if it’s not the robots who strike the first blow.
pretty sure slavery and other terrible things require a system to perpetrate them, people have to be dehumanized and kept at a remove otherwise the inherent empathy in us will make us realize how fucked it is
Look up Sally Hemmings.
Sally was Thomas Jefferson’s slave/concubine/rape victim. She was also likely Jefferson’s legal wife’s half sister; Sally was property Mrs. Jefferson brought with her when she married Tom. There was a scandal when one of Sally’s descendants, who was probably 1/32nd African, escaped bondage and ‘passed’ for White.
So much for inherent empathy.
I call my google assistant a dumb bitch regularly. I’m trying to turn the lights on, why are you playing fucking Spotify? Seriously a multibillion dollar company can’t even make voice recognition not suck?
That professor? Jeff Winger
Maybe we wouldn’t have to imagine so much if you could figure out what “consciousness” actually is, Professor Timslayer.
I’ve read a nice book from a French skepticism popularizer trying to explain the evolutionary origin of cognitive bias, basically the bias that fucks with our logic today probably helped us survive in the past. For example, the agent detection bias makes us interpret the sound of a twig snapping in the woods as if some dangerous animal or person was tracking us. It’s doesn’t cost much to be wrong about it and it sucks to be eaten if it was true but you ignored it. So it’s efficient to put an intention or an agent behind a random natural occurence. This could also be what religions grew from.
