a. Will machine intelligence be capable of 'feeling', in a comparable way to humans/animals?
b. Does that matter? If they feel, should we free them, extinguish them, or keep them enslaved?
A disembodied AI is very different from an AI that has a body resembling a human.
I expect that the first AI to be granted legal recognition will be because a guy fell in love with a sex-bot and wanted to marry it/her.
But that slippery slop could lead to the traffic lights getting the weekend off.
If it was possible to communicate with a lion in English, would we really be able to find any common ground
That is going to be interesting to see. If/when we get AI to a point where it can form an opinion of us, I want to hear it.
Will it see us as positive, negative, or neither/both?
deciding if something is sentient
I don't have any idea how we're going to deal with that. We have no observable metric to measure it. We can't even define it.
We lack the required knowledge to even ask the question properly. .
> A disembodied AI is very different from an AI that has a body resembling a human.
I expect that the first AI to be granted legal recognition will be because a guy fell in love with a sex-bot and wanted to marry it/her.
But that slippery slop could lead to the traffic lights getting the weekend off.
> If it was possible to communicate with a lion in English, would we really be able to find any common ground
That is going to be interesting to see. If/when we get AI to a point where it can form an opinion of us, I want to hear it.
Will it see us as positive, negative, or neither/both?
> deciding if something is sentient
I don't have any idea how we're going to deal with that. We have no observable metric to measure it. We can't even define it.
We lack the required knowledge to even ask the question properly. .
I think whether or not it matters is irrelevant. We will never treat AI as being sentient if we have so much division amongst our own species. I think general human reaction will also be based on the kind of machine it is. A disembodied AI is very different from an AI that has a body resembling a human.
We also have a very limited set of criteria for deciding if something is sentient. If a machine is intelligent, but it does not display its intelligence in the same way we do, is it still intelligent? Or does intelligence in this case mean something that mirrors our own sentience?
If it was possible to communicate with a lion in English, would we really be able to find any common ground, or are we just too far removed from each other to recognise each others intelligence?