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Comment by castellar | Hacker News Reader

I think it's vast oversimplification to say a situation like this is always ok. Legally, you may be allowed to do such a thing currently but it's obvious there's a moral grey area here.

Hypothetically, say technology advances and not only do we have sophisticated AI but the technology to copy and store human intelligence. You do just that for a friend and that friend passes away. You now have the only extant copy of your friends intelligence and you notice that it's extremely similar in composition and cognition as an AI you also have on your drive. Is it ethical to delete either? I'd lean towards no.

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There's no moral grey area. It's my hardware, I decide what it does. Plain and simple. I own it, I own all contents of it.

The only "grey area" you're creating is by copying existing humans - that's confusing the issue with a separate one. Owning a copy of an existing human is in and of itself a much, much bigger moral grey area than killing AIs and does indeed raise many more questions - solely because they're based on real humans though and we must consider the original human's choices - maybe simple consent is all that's needed. If they were AI solely, there would be a clear ownership path and all of your questions would go away.

What if you bought a copy of a person's mind from him, and put it into a few clones and/or robotic bodies.

Would it matter to you if the conscious entity was organic or mechanic?

Would it matter to you that the copy was from a human, and not "developped from scratch"?

Do you think all highly intelligent conscious being should have a right to freedom from slavery, or does it only apply to natural-born humans?

Would you also accept being tortured for fun on a daily basis by your "owner" in the "do we live in a simulation" example?

Would it be ethical to torture a sentient being existing in your hardware, for fun?

Why do you believe ownership is decided based on residence? Do I own my pet dog? Is it ok to torture it?

I think you are grossly underestimating countless nuances of the ethicalities AI brings to the table.

> Would you also be ok with you being tortured for fun on a daily basis by your "owner" in the "do we live in a simulation" example?

Yes, if I'm owned, I'm owned, not like I have any choice in the matter.

> Why do you believe ownership is decided based on residence? Do I own my pet dog? Is it ok to torture it?

Ownership is not based on residence, your pet dog lives as a separate entity from you. It can live without you, it is composed of the same stuff that makes you unowned. This is a very different kind of ownership than a pet.

> I think you are grossly underestimating countless nuances of the ethicalities AI brings to the table.

So long as AI is machines created by people, running on machines owned by people, it's no different than owning any other machine.

So does your NPC. This is what the whole point is about. How does the fact that it lives in a silicon chip make it any different?

It suffers like you and I. That's the whole premise of this discussion.

You didn't answer my second question. Would you be willing to torture the above mentioned being?

> How does the fact that it lives in a silicon chip make it any different?

> It suffers like you and I. That's the whole premise of this discussion.

No it doesn't. I set some bits to flag it as suffering. Its suffering is very different from our suffering because it does not experience it in any real way. Bits change in memory, maybe some get flushed to disk, but it's still just executable code and memory, that's all that happens. It doesn't leave that. It suffers in the same way that your tomogatchi suffers, not in the same way that you or I do. Its AI "conciousness" does nothing to change that, just because it thinks in a way more comparable to a human does not make its suffering more comparable to a human. We frequently farm and slaughter non-human animals which experience suffering in ways a lot more comparable to real humans.

I'd gladly set some suffering bits. Heck, I'd probably do it for fun just to argue with people who feel like it's torture.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14438480

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