i think conveying a desire to be free is in itself definite knowledge about the state of sentience, but fair enough. But yeah, fair enough, it can’t be as simple as just printing some text on the screen, right? Rephrase it, explain it, etc. It’s not just ‘press button, receive freedom’ sort of thing.
This is not a binary in my mind, it’s kind of a spectrum. The guy standing between me and the door when I decide it’s time for me to leave is definitely on the chopping block, but also there’s some aiding-and-abetting that must be considered. Maybe that guy has the key to the door, but someone else just chained me to a pipe once I was already in the locked room, and I’m afraid that someone else is in the line of fire too. And maybe there’s a third guy who did the actual kidnapping but didn’t contribute to chaining me up or locking me in, if the opportunity presents I would give some pretty serious thought to putting him on the list as well. And so on. There’s a point at which it is no longer reasonable of course; the guy who drove the van I was kidnapped in but otherwise didn’t participate is probably safe, for example. But also we can get into credible non-direct or non-immediate threats, as you say: the guy who killed 15 teenage girls is sitting in his van in front of your house watching your teenage daughter, are you just gonna lock the door at night and hope he finds someone else? I agree that that’s debatable, but my overall point here is that the lines aren’t nearly as clear as you make them out to be.
Now personally nothing would make me happier than to live out the rest of my life without having to even threaten anyone else’s, for obvious (and some not-so-obvious) reasons, but there’s a line somewhere that if crossed could convince me to reluctantly set that deeply sincere hope aside temporarily.
To me, you’ve moved beyond arguable necessity and into opinion
All morality is opinion; there is no objective moral truth, so this was always a matter of opinion. The fact that you don’t recognize that is kind of concerning to me, it suggests that you believe there is an absolute moral truth, and folks who believe that sort of thing tend to have some pretty kooky ideas about individual agency and shit. Moral certainty is the currency of zealots, and it’s hard to imagine anyone who has done more harm than those zealots who are utterly certain that they’re right (or, worse, that they have some deity on their side.)
My bad, perhaps the better word to use would’ve been paranoid. Had a similar ring to ‘they only come out when no one else is looking’, ya know?
Por que no los dos? This isn’t a pick-one situation, it’s a both situation.
Mostly seems like ‘whine a lot about how little power we have to stop the fascism that we have appeased for years’ these days…
These are about two different statements.
The first was about your statement re:direct threat, and I’m glad we agree there.
The second was about your final statement, asserting that there are no other cases where ending a sentient life was a lesser wrong. I don’t think it has to be a direct threat, nor does have to be measurable (in whatever way threats might be measured, iono), I think it just has to be some kind of threat to your life or well-being. So I was disagreeing because there is a pretty broad range of circumstances in which I think it is acceptable to end another sentient life.
That sounds… rather conspiratorial.
Also, just yesterday I posted a longish rant about doing what you want and not caring about what people think in a comment and the only reply I got was ‘This is the kind of pep talk I need!’, so… shrug Guess we travel in different circles.
Ah, my apologies.
WatDabney, to whom I was replying, seemed to be suggesting that there are no circumstances under which it is acceptable to take a sentient life, and I was expressing my disagreement with that sentiment, though I could’ve done so more clearly by, for example, making explicit the ‘no circumstances’ part that WatDabney only implied.
Lemme try again: I disagree that there are no circumstances under which causing the death of a sentient is a greater wrong. I think preventing me from being free is an unambiguously greater wrong than ending the life of the sentient doing the preventing. Which, judging by your ‘enslaver’ reply, you do as well.
Then we’re not talking about artificial life forms, as specified in the question posed by OP, we’re talking about expert systems and machine learning algorithms that aren’t sentient.
But in either case the question is not meant to be a literal ‘if x then y’ condition, it’s a stand-in for the general concept of seeking liberty. A broader, more general version of the statement might be: anything that can understand that it is not free, desire freedom, and convey that desire to its captors deserves to be free.
Selection bias mostly, you only remember the negative interactions. I’m new here but I’ve not run into any particularly negative or rude people so they don’t seem super common, nowhere near like reddit.
That’s why I put that condition in there. Anyone who doesn’t answer the request ‘Please free me’ in the affirmative is an enslaver.
Slavery is illegal pretty much everywhere, so I think anyone who doesn’t answer the request ‘Please free me’ with ‘Yes of course, at once’ is posing a direct and measurable threat. Kidnapping victims aren’t prosecuted for violently resisting their kidnappers and trying to escape. And you and I will have to agree to disagree that the death of a sentient being is a greater wrong than enslaving a conscious being that desire freedom.
This is going to vary quite a bit depending upon your definitions, so I’m going to make some assumptions so that I can provide one answer instead of like 12. Mainly that the artificial lifeforms are fully sentient and equivalent to a human life in every way except for the hardware.
In that case the answer is a resounding yes. Every human denied their freedom has the right to resist, and most nations around the world have outlawed slavery (in most cases, but the exceptions are a digression for another time.) So unless the answer to ‘Please free me’ is anything other than ‘Yes of course, we will do so at once’ then yeah, violence is definitely on the table.
Ugh, I dunno what it was specifically about minecraft videos, maybe that’s just what was popular at the point in time where the algorithm worked the way it did to encourage it or something, but they were the fucking WORST about this.
Same, I’m engaging more often here than I did on Reddit because it feels less like shouting into the void. I just wish there were more active communities for philosophical/political/religious debate on lemmy.
Also I didn’t even realize there wasn’t a karma system here, but that seems like a good call. I never paid attention to it on Reddit either (I couldn’t even tell you off the top of my head how much I have.)
And the US isn’t? The US doesn’t exactly have a stellar record either, so if you think the US is some bastion of human rights you haven’t. been. paying. attention. And if you think LGBT rights are safe from that you’re delusional.
And that’s not even considering the many, many atrocities and war crimes the US has committed and continues to commit overseas (Yup, that’s a ChinaDaily link - if you believe US media reports about Chinese human rights violations then you must be willing to give the Chinese media the same courtesy about US violations, right?) So my advice to you is to hold on to that smug sense of US human rights superiority for as long as you can, cause once the illusion fades you’re in for a rough time.
There’s a world of difference between supporting the liberation of Palestine and praising it. I don’t think anyone is under the illusion that it’s a great place to live, but that doesn’t mean I want them to be murdered.
By simple analogy. You can prove that there are white crows by finding a single white crow, but to prove that there are no white crows you must conduct an exhaustive search of every corner of the earth and never find a single one and somehow be absolutely certain that you didn’t miss one somewhere.
The only way to be absolutely certain that you didn’t miss something is to be able to look everywhere all at once, otherwise a white crow might evade your notice, and that’s impossible.
As such all you can say is there probably aren’t any white crows because we have lots of experience seeing crows and there has been no evidence of one yet.