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Comment by sho_hn | Hacker News Reader

> "You’ll find people who can wax rhapsodic about the singularity and how everything is going to change with AGI. But if I just look at it and say, if 10 years from now, we have ‘universal remote employees’ that are artificial general intelligences, run on clouds, and people can just dial up and say, ‘I want five Franks today and 10 Amys, and we’re going to deploy them on these jobs,’ and you could just spin up like you can cloud-access computing resources, if you could cloud-access essentially artificial human resources for things like that—that’s the most prosaic, mundane, most banal use of something like this."

So, slavery?

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Related: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

I was quoting "Measure of a Man" :-)

"Lena" is a bit of different case because it's not AGI. Probably ripe for the "forced prison labor" suggested by your sibling as the moral cop-out. Imagine being sentenced to being a cloud VM image!

Is there a good way to distinguish between the brain dumps in Lena and what you'd call an AGI?

A brain dump has a history, and we ascribe meaning to the past. As mentioned the thread here has mentioned forced prison labor as a form of socially acceptable slavery, and society could convince itself that a given brain dump deserves its fate, even that it is a form of atonement.

Artifical life on the other hand is presumably "pure at birth".

Of course it's not that easy. You could discuss whether individual instances have unique sets of human rights, and value potential futures over pasts.

Sounds like 'Age of Em' by Robin Hanson: https://ageofem.com/

Computer time is paid for.

Will the AIs own the computers?

What happens when we digitize ourselves and can run said snapshot image on "computer time"? We can barely cope with legal issues in the digital age now.

Isn't it a similar problem to humans on hostile biosphere like the promised Martian colonies?

Even breathing and drinking water are sourced by megacorps-in-charge

I think there’s broad consensus that slavery only applies to human labor. Even within that spectrum people avoid the term (see forced prison labor). We also don’t use it for animal labor, for instance.

> animal labor

The context uses human-like/human-level a lot, but I agree what level and type of intelligence commands human respect is tricky business.

> forced prison labor

Would be interesting if we found ways to convince ourselves the AIs had it coming.

Generally speaking, slavery has been morally acceptable and popular before, and I will also not be surprised if we return to those ways.

Human slaves were often considered to be less than human or, at the very least, not deserving of basic rights that other humans enjoyed, as part of the moral and ethical frameworks that supported the practice. I think we might see the same shift in dominant ideology if we do have “true” AGI. I’m sure I could be convinced that an intelligence that develops and grows over a number of years begins to have a right to exist and a right to freedom of expression and movement.

Given the outcry/backlash over Dall-E/ChatGPT (what is "real art", etc.) and how much of our society is permeated by a search for authenticity (perceived) already, I wonder if you're right. We might decide "artifical" lifeforms are a lower class than "evolved in nature". For many religions this could be a natural take - made by God vs. folly of man, etc.

If we ever conjure a way to capture the human consciousness and preserve it before death, "AI" will be based on indentured servitude.

The people given a second chance at life will be the ones who are quickest at identifying traffic signals or fire hydrants from a line up of images.

I wonder if those Franks and Amys would just think they are working remote jobs hammering out tickets from their studio apartments lol.

There is a video game called 'Soma' that touches on this very topic.

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