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?
Whatever it means to you to be conscious, self-aware, and interested
And how would you tell? Chatbots pass the Turing test, so how could you tell if a machine is intelligent and self aware or just acting like it is. Thinking about that goes Blade Runnery soon.
Saudi Arabia has a robot citizen which has more rights than a woman. So that might be where it goes.
What I meant was, because that is such a nebulous and unanswerable question, just skip it.
For the purpose of the post assume that we worked out those details and now have something everyone agrees is a human-like consciousness. Whatever that is.
I'm interested in knowing if people think we will get to a point like that. And, if so, how should we treat this new pseudo-life?
IMHO we should still categorize them as machines, legally and emotionally.
They might kill me later for this comment.
If you're interested in the matter, there's lots of cyberpunk/scifi out there exploring many outcomes.
'Feeling' is difficult to define, I'm trying to sidestep that. Whatever it means to you to be conscious, self-aware, and interested.
You could free them by allowing them self-determination and equipping them with the ability to modify their own code.
Personally I don't think that would end well for humanity, but would be a fascinating experiment.