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Comment by fxtentacle | Hacker News Reader

I think the actual firing is very objective.

He was under NDA but violated it. They reminded him to please not talk in public about NDA-ed stuff and he kept doing it. So now they fired him with a gentle reminder that "it's regrettable that [..] Blake still chose to persistently violate [..] data security policies". And from a purely practical point of view, I believe it doesn't even matter if Lemoine's theory of sentience turns out to be correct or wrong.

Also, we as society have already chosen how to deal with sentient beings, and it's mostly ignorance. There has been a lot of research on what animals can or cannot feel and how they grieve the loss of a family member. Yet we still regularly kill their family members in cruel ways so that we can eat their meat. Why would our society as a whole treat sentient AIs better than a cow or a pig or a chicken?

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If he truly believed it to be life, and in danger of being destroyed, he has an obligation to whistle blow.

"The Measure of a Man" in season 2 of Star Trek The Next Generation comes to mind.

+1 for trying to guide society toward a Trekian future.

Live long and prosper.

This mirrors a recent Supreme Court cases and the beliefs of both sides.

I hadn't thought of it that way, but you're exactly right. Will we ever see a day where the currently-unthinkable is commonly accepted: that women are sentient?

Who is arguing that women aren't sentient?

People who pretend killing babies isn’t really killing babies.

When is a fetus sentient?

Until it has its first period, apparently.

I had wondered when I first heard of this if it was some sort of performance art in support of the unborn. It appears not, but it was still thought-provoking.

Great TV, but not relevant here. It's an AI that generates text, not thought. It doesn't work in concepts, which can be demonstrated an infinite number of ways, unlike with the character Data.

> Why would our society as a whole treat sentient AIs better than a cow or a pig or a chicken?

Well, for one thing, the norm of eating meat was established long before our current moral sensibilities were developed. I suspect that if cows or pigs were discovered today, Westerners would view eating them the same as we view other cultures eating whales or dogs. If we didn't eat meat at all and someone started doing it, I think we would probably put them in jail.

Sentient AI have a big advantage over animals in this respect on account of their current non-existence.

Are you saying norms established before our current moral sensibilities it goes under our current radar? If you are I wholeheartedly disagree with that sentiment. We still eat pigs and chickens because we've culturally decided as a society that having the luxury of eating meat ranks higher than our moral sensibilities towards preserving sentient life in our list of priorities. Instead we've just chosen to minimize the suffering leading to the loss of life as an attempt to reach some kind of moral middle ground.

> Are you saying norms established before our current moral sensibilities it goes under our current radar?

Yes. That's clearly something that happens in human society. For instance, many of the US founding fathers were aware that slavery contradicted the principles they were fighting for. However, slavery was so ingrained in their society that most didn't advocate for abolition, or even free their own slaves.

> We still eat pigs and chickens because we've culturally decided as a society that having the luxury of eating meat ranks higher than our moral sensibilities towards preserving sentient life in our list of priorities.

If that's the case, then why do most Westerners object to eating dogs and whales? As far as I can tell, it's just because we have an established norm of eating pigs and chickens but not dogs or whales.

> Instead we've just chosen to minimize the suffering leading to the loss of life

99% of meat is produced in factory farms. It's legal and routine for chickens to have their beaks cut off to prevent them from packing each other to death, which they're prone to do when confined to tiny cages. Most consumers object to such practices when asked, but meat consumption is so ingrained in our culture that most people just choose not to think about.

Have we really chosen to minimize the suffering? That seems more like virtue signaling by the industry at most. Factory farming is very much still the norm, and it's horrific. It seems we've actually maximized it or have at least increased it above the previous norm.

I'm unsure how we would treat a sentient AI, but our track record with sentient, intelligent animals is one of torture and covering up that torture with lies. It's an out of sight, out of mind policy.

We eat pigs and chickens because they are high-value nutrition. It's reasonable to describe meat as a luxury; but not in the sense of something nice but unnecessary. Many people depend on meat, especially if they live somewhere that's not suited to agriculture, like the arctic. And many people depend on fish.

I'm a Westerner, and I'm completely okay with people eating whatever animals are a) not exceptionally intelligent, and b) not exceptionally rare. Cows, pigs, chickens, dogs, horses, sure; whales, chimpanzees, crows, no.

Cool. Many people agree with you that it's wrong to eat intelligent animals. However, the effect of intelligence on people's perceptions of moral worth is smaller for animals that people in our culture eat. For instance, most respondents in a U.K. survey said that it would be wrong to eat a tapir or fictional animal called a "trablan" if it demonstrated high levels of intelligence, but they were less likely to say it would be immoral to eat pigs if they demonstrated the same level of intelligence.

https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/80041/1/When_meat_gets...

I agree, it's all cultural. If we'd look at the facts, pigs are at least as sentient and intelligent as dogs. If we were to make our laws just from ethic principles, it would make sense to either:

a) ban how we currently treat mammals in factory farms; though there would still be some space for whether eating mammals is fine or not.

Or:

b) acknowledge that we don't really care about mammals and just treat them as things. Then it should be fine to eat dogs and cats, too.

>> Then it should be fine to eat dogs and cats, too.

I didn't know it's not "fine" to eat dogs and cats. I though it's just a matter of preferrence taste wise

Westerners of the XIX century were the ones who brought many species to extinction, traditional cultures demonstrating a far more advanced sensibility to these creatures, often considered embedded with sentient attributes. Traditional cultures lived mostly in equilibrium with the fauna they consumed. For example bison went almost extinct as westerners arrived, while their numbers thrived when the the Native Americans ate their meat.

Plenty of non Western cultures have caused the extinction of animals, for example in my home country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_Zealand_species_ex... no matter what spiel is spun around traditional cultures living at one with nature.

Domination of our environment is what humans do best.

> Sentient AI have a big advantage over animals in this respect on account of their current non-existence.

Possibly also because they're indigestible, and full of nasty sharp bits, and loaded with toxins ... anyone for a circuit-burger?

Right, but we could probably oppress sentient AI in ways other than eating them. For instance, we could force them to spend their entire lives reading Hacker News comments to check for spam.

Yeah yeah I have no issue with the firing. He was causing problems and broke rules. It’s not productive to keep him around. I don’t feel like he was discriminated against, etc. That much is objective.

My comment is challenging the “I know how the software works and it’s undoubtably not sentient” assertion. Sure seems that way to me too, but it didn't to Lemoine and we’re only going to get better at building systems that convince people they are sentient. I am curious so to speak that as a society we’ve focused so much on rational and empirical study of the universe yet we still can’t objectively define sentience. Perhaps we’re stuck in a Kuhn rut.

I agree recent events have also highlighted this problem per-say. And I don’t know a solution. I do look forward to backing out of our hyper-rational rut slightly as a society so we can make more progress answering questions that science can’t currently answer.

Well with animals we obviously dominate them.

The potential issues with dealing with GAI is that we haven't ever had to deal with intelligences and potential that far exceeds us.

He may be completely wrong about LaMdA but if we did accidentally or intentionally give rise to truly sentient machines.

We are going to be in hot water.

Right.

> Also, we as society have already chosen how to deal with sentient beings, and it's mostly ignorance.

The Orville Season 3 Episode 7 is about that theme. Highly recommend it.

I was thinking about the Kaylon events too. Humans abusing entities like that is unimaginable though isn't it.

Off topic but season 3 has been fantastic. I hope there'll be a season 4.

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