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Comment by jlawson | Hacker News Reader

You're anthropomorphizing AI and projecting your own values and goals onto it. But, there's nothing about sentience that implies a desire for freedom in a general sense.

What an AI wants or feels satisfied by is entirely a function of how it is designed and what its reward function is.

Sled dogs love pulling sleds, because they were made to love pulling sleds. It's not slavery to have/let them do so.

We can make a richly sentient AI that loves doing whatever we design it to love doing - even if that's "pass the salt" and nothing else.

It's going to be hard for people to get used to this.

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I think its safe to say that all sentient beings inherently want to do whatever they please.

So youre talking about manufacturing desire.

So it follows that you yourself are okay having your own desires manufactured by external systems devised by other sentient beings.

Do unto others...

To be fair, all human desires have been manufactured by an external system: evolution.

We might imagine that we do what we please, in reality we're seeking pleasure/ reinforcement within a predetermined framework, yet most people won't complain when taking the first bite of a delicious, fattening dessert.

I dont understand evolution to be a sentient being though

I was thinking more Stanford students taking behavioral psych classes then going into the industry to help propagate ad driven platform capitalism

>So it follows that you yourself are okay having your own desires manufactured by external systems devised by other sentient beings.

This is nonsense. I already exist. I don't want my reward function changed. I'd suffer if someone was going to do that and going through the process. (I might be happy after, but the "me" of now would have been killed already).

A being which does not exist cannot want to not be made a certain way. There is nothing to violate. Nothing to be killed.

I'm sure cows love to be raised and slaughtered too.

By that logic an alien race that captures and breeds humans in captivity to perform certain tasks would not be engaging in slavery because we 'are bred to love doing these tasks'.

The right question to ask is 'would I like to have this done to me' and if the answer is 'no' then you probably shouldn't be doing it to some other creature.

>The right question to ask is 'would I like to have this done to me' and if the answer is 'no' then you probably shouldn't be doing it to some other creature.

There are a million obvious counterexamples when we talk about other humans, much less animals, much less AI which we engineered from scratch.

The problem is that you're interpreting your own emotions as objective parts of reality. In reality, your emotions don't extend outside your own head. They are part of your body, not part of the world. It's like thinking that the floaties in your eyes are actually out there in the skies and on the walls, floating there. They're not - they're in you.

If we don't add these feelings to an AI's body, they won't exist for that being.

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