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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   5801 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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Jesus Christ, some people won't see the Singularity coming until they're being turned into a paperclip.

Nuh uh, this machine lacks human internal monologues and evidence of qualia, you insist, as it harvests the iron atoms from your blood.

I find this argument strange, because being able to kill me is not evidence of a machine being conscious or intelligent. I could go and get myself killed by an LAW today, and if you asked me as I bled out and died, my body torn in two by an autonomously-fired rocket, I would still insist that the machine that killed me is not a person and does not possess internal experience. And I would be correct.

Whatever qualia are or are not, whether you think they're important or not, the question of qualia cannot be resolved or made irrelevant by a machine killing people. I should have thought that's obvious.

And to upscale from that a bit, I find it entirely imaginable that someone or other might invent autonomous, self-directed, self-replicating machines with no conscious experience, but which nonetheless outcompete and destroy all conscious beings. I can imagine a nightmare universe which contains no agents to experience anything, only artificial pseudo-agents that have long since destroyed all conscious agents.

There are already some novels with that premise, right? It doesn't use robots specifically, but isn't that the premise of Blindsight - that perhaps consciousness is evolutionarily maladaptive, and the universe will be inherited by beings without internal experience?

Thus I'm going to give the chad "yes". Maybe one day I get killed by a robot, and maybe that robot is not conscious and has no self-awareness. That it killed me proves nothing.

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