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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34906 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

The story covers explicitly emulated humans. I don't think that giving them rights would turn out to be particularly controversial IRL after teething pains.

It's when you consider the moral weight of subhuman, superhuman and outright alien intelligences (like GPT) that the headaches begin.

I don't think that giving them rights would turn out to be particularly controversial IRL

It would if there's a huge amount of money to be made by not giving them rights. Which is the point of mmacevedo.

It would take an exceptionally unlikely confluence of events for us to end up with a stable equilibrium where emulated humans are in any way, shape or form economically superior to nonhuman AGI for the same amount of compute.

Such a future is akin to worrying about flocks of birds being enslaved to drag heavy cargo along versus a 747, which is why Hanson's Age of Em is a poor work of futurism.

Humans ignore other humans' rights all the time. And there's a large number of people (a majority?) who don't even agree that any simulated mind can be real. Couple that with a profit motive, and widespread virtual slavery seems not just possible but likely.

The rights accorded to non-human intelligences, regardless of level, is of course even more fraught.

I would be willing to bet that that scenario falls under what I call teething pains.

I fully expect that in a a decade or two it'll become as non-controversial as say, IVF technology. Further, as I said in my other comment, it's quite implausible that human uploads will have any significant economic role to play versus dedicated AGI.

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